APRIL 30, 2015 IS IT TRUE

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IS IT TRUE we urge our readers to read the attached letter from Evansville City Council President. Dr. Dan Adams?  ….we want to thank Dr. Adams for going beyond the call of duty to creating a much needed Petri dish of Team Care instruction at the new IU Med School?

April 27, 2015
Representative Todd Huston
200 W Washington Street
Indianapolis, IN 46204

Dear Representative Huston:

As an adjunct Volunteer Clinical Associate Professor of Surgery at the IU School of Medicine-Evansville (IUMS-E), I am emailing you all to thank you for fully funding, at this point, the IUMS -E component of the downtown expansion of our new campus. The time crunch necessitates that I use an email rather than a formal letter. I beseech you to augment your laudable backing to allow Neu Med’s four-year dream for creating a much needed Petri dish of Team Care instruction to come forth. The concept of having IUMS-E, UE, USI, and Ivy Tech students all working and learning together will reap huge benefits for Indiana’s future health care delivery. Please let me explain.

Having grown up in Boston with a MD Dad and two Irish MD uncles, a nurse Mom and two Irish nurse aunts, a nurse sister, and a US Navy corpsman brother…and having worked in over twenty hospitals during my career as a cardiovascular-thoracic surgeon… I may not know everything, but I do KNOW medicine! There have been great changes in its delivery over that period. The time of the omnipotent MD god has passed and now we are seeking a new paradigm. Team Care allows all those involved in a patient’s well being to bring to his case regimen their equally respected opinions and expertise. This potent collage results in the best of wellness and patient care results. We are trying to inculcate this concept on Day One in both undergraduate and graduate students here on the Downtown Evansville campus.

In my frequent lectures at IUMS-E, I have observed that as early as the second year of medical school, some students are taking on “I am a MD and the rest of you are NOT” attitude. It is our four-year dream to create a new, vibrant, revolutionary Team Care milieu. This way of life will be instituted on the very first day for all the students who step on the campus, regardless of what degree they are pursuing. Without funding, this dream will fall fallow and Team Care will fail to be done in actual practice on the floors of hospitals years later. By then, it may be too late to change concretized behavior.

The Wall Street Journal and many other sources (See Appendix A) extol the virtues of the Team Care concept. If you look at the architectural design of the proposed Nue Med building (See Appendix B), you will see that ALL the students will be purposefully forced to intermingle in the atrium where the two wings meet on the ground floor, in the common library area, and in the Simulation Center on floors above. It is in this last area where so much learning can be attained together. In the Simulation Center, groups made up of medical students, nurse practitioners, physicians assistants, bachelor degree seeking nurses, associate nurses, medical technicians of all specialties, and medical assistants can come together. They will learn how to handle codes of all sorts, start IVs without the pain of early practice, intubate tough airways, and develop the much needed teamwork for every life threatening format.

Where it’s OK to screw up and lose your manikin patient over and over until you get it right. The Team Care group will deal with the full gamut of medical, surgical, ER, OR, Maternity and Pediatric emergencies …just like airline pilot training! The crucial respect and trust for each one’s strengths will be melded. Practice will make perfect. Thus after they graduate, our students will not contribute to the usual, well-documented uptick of a teaching hospital’s July mortality. And yes, patients will get the complete care that they deserve with economic value.

Team Care is the hope of the future of American medicine, delivering total medical care and multi-points of wellness at the lowest cost long-term. We want to brand all the students with its benefits. It is beginning to be taught now in many medical schools, most notable at Harvard, my medical school alma mater, and soon at Indiana. But just having the medical students practice it together is not good enough. Team Care needs to be an integral part of the entire spectrum of the medical care student body, so it becomes their soul’s brand. If USI and Ivy Tech are not there in the Neu Med building in downtown Evansville, it won’t happen.

Please fund USI and Ivy Tech medical building proposal at a level that will sustain their physical presence on our downtown campus. Thus, our dream of making a superb, total Team Care will become a much needed medical practice reality.

Thank you for reading this communication. If you would like to discuss this crucial need with me in more detail, please email me at drhda501@aol.com.

Sincerely yours

H. Dan Adams MD FACS MBA

President of the 2015 Evansville City Council

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40 COMMENTS

  1. P.S.
    Our city is in major debt to actually have this Downtown, vrs. on the east/westside! Please send more money!

  2. Dr. Adams:

    You make a convincing argument, I buy it.

    Now put your money-where-your-mouth-is: move the $ 20 Million developer subsidy for the Hotel over to the Med School. To not do so would be hypocritical on your part.

  3. I think this article would have been better placed in the FEATURED section, as opposed to the IS IT TRUE section.

  4. Now. . .since the Winnecke Republicans have gutted the Ivy Tech portion of the project why do we need to build the 552 space garage for only 200 med students. . . Ivy Tech had the majority of the student, didn’t they? . . .

    and are we not now subsidizing the project by 70% . . .and now the hotel went from 20 million to 28 million . . the two things that are on a diet is the size of Winnecke’s touted projects. . .the hotel and the med . . ever decreasing in size but not in the amount of money the taxpayers have to shell out . .

    if Winnecke just had the fever to the rest of the 63 square miles of Evansville instead of that one square mile called downtown???

    • Dances, Do you think they should have had an alternate plan available the day after the funding level was announced ?

      • I do agree that the alternative plan would have been to put the school out on the East Side near Deaconess Gateway Hospital where the city’s costs would have been much less. But they are damn determined to build up the downtown at the cost of everything else in this town.

        Think about who owns all the property in the downtown area. Who are these people and how to the control city government? A few Google searches might lead to some clues. Start out using the Assessors GIST System to check out who’s the listed owner of each of the downtown properties. That’s all public records.

      • Absolutely . . .as most of us should recall there was a stampede to put in play the 57 million bond. . .card blanc . . and to purchase D-pat for 8.4 million. . .ridiculous . . not to mention the property tax phase-in on their re-locate area . . .ridiculous . . .but why should we be surprised . . .it has been nearly 3 1/2 years on this damned Convention Motel . . millions spent on design and re-design . . .I would like to have the artist renditions fees of the hotel and IU Med . . .that, my friend would amount to some bucks!!!!

  5. I agree that the project should be reviewed. The 2 parking garages are around $11 million. Without Ivy Tech, there will be 300 students at most. At $57 million plus half of the parking garage covered by the hotel bond, that’s about $60 million for 300 students. That’s $200,000 each. The real problem with Winnecke is perpetually getting the cart before the horse. He’s already given D-Pat $8.4 million and purchased the property for a medical school that was promised to transform downtown with its 2000 students. We are out over $15 million when we find out that the Ivy Tech students won’t be there. 300 students and their instructors aren’t going to have much of an impact on the economic activity of the downtown. Most restaurants have excess capacity for food service now. They can absorb the couple of hundred people that may buy lunch every day. Not every student will be there every day and will sometimes we working at hospitals. This has turned into another economic turd. The Ford Center didn’t deliver on lasting new businesses downtown and neither will this project.

    • @Random Thoughts:

      Good post. If the financial situation of Evansville is as bleak as we’ve been reading . . . . why not just repurpose the Centre for the IU +USI ? That building will surely take care of 300 students + faculty. Take a money-losing facility (big time), and actually get something in return.

      • It would seem that buildings lay out is pretty bad for a student learning facility. First it has the same seriously crumby infrastructure as what surrounds it.
        Especially across MLK boulevard. “The boulevard of broken dreams” and its zombie infrastructure availabilities.

        One would thing its usage is misdirected , they continue to say the place is a funding vortex vacuum . That’s because of its location and what’s offered inside. The projection of repurposing that still leaves it in the zombie infrastructure as well.
        The whole place has the wrong mix to be profitable, it was pretty much a hard kill when they build the blunder dome across the street. Any modern designer can take one look at the fruitless layout and see the logistical fubar that is downtown Evansville. However working masterpiece is attainable with the proper insight and open communication transparently blending a modern and working overall theme.

        One building project on the correct location, and some modern throughput accesses and the old place would be off to the races. Right now with the projected sites for the school and the short sheet motel, the place doesn’t have a snowballs chance in hell of ever being an community wide revenue asset.

        Ole McRobbie whew, hope they at least kissed’m first.

        • Correction: “One would think” Wish you had an edit feature that would be a nice “thing”

    • That’s 300 students each and ever year from the time the school opens projected well into the future. Think about it… 300 new medical doctors graduating each and every year for years to come and settling down in this area ( a % of them will). These new doctors over the many years into the future will add considerable to the betterment of this community. They will be spending huge sums of money in the area and this will have a huge impact on merchants in the area. They will have to buy clothing, housing, cars, insurance etc and will have a large amount of disposable income to purchase airplanes, golf clubs, Country Club memberships and boats just to name a few off the top of my head. You should drive around some of the more affluent neighborhoods in Newburgh, IN and see the houses that the Doctors and other Medical People built and live in. They hire contractors and lawn and garden folks to help build and maintain their homes and property thus adding more to the local community. And over the years the 200 or 300 a year that graduate will turn into Thousands of new Doctors where some of them will choose to take up residency in this area. They will add to the tax base and be a welcomed addition to our community.

    • Random, Politics are fickle. If the med center is slashed what happens if say in three years they decide to move I.Tech there ?

  6. 2000 students was always bs. What other branch med school in the country even has 200?

    • The school will be teaching more than just medical doctor students. Nurse Practicianers and Nursing students as well as dental students will be among those going to the IU Evansville Medical School Campus to study their various disciplines.

  7. Basically, “everyone knows” the old Evansville downtown is a deplorable site for a modern medical school. Right now the zombie infrastructure spews toxicity from, and into that location with every CSO event. Combined sewers and horrid logistical accesses , overcharged utilities, and a mandate to find a solution the way it is at present. That site is just plain wrong when the needs of the people that must use the location is weighed and balanced. Anything built in that menagerie of mistakes now will soon wither on the vine just like the blunder dome _ ord center.

    When looking in from outside the whole “double foot print, tree high, short sheet Hilton” and the projected medical extension school seem to just be a bailout for some people that sat on their hands as the world changed around them.

    IU should get a grip on the real situation and build that either on the USI campus or the two county I-69 corridor. Build where the action is and the infrastructure is in place and waiting.
    Also on the other sites there is little need for a parking garage. A modern well designed parking area with 21st century access and egress and controlled active landscaping would only contribute to the entire regional activities. Another thing will these couple of hundred students have access to clinical at Owensboro health? If so , the conditionals on the I-69 corridor begin to take on the look of true logistical metro balancing for the future and its growth expectations.

    More buildings, and facilities for the buck, plain and simple.

    “Aedificabimus climate migrations”

    • V

      Right on the money about the USI location.

      IIT that when you stop to consider that USI was going to COMPLETELY give the land that would be required for the IU-MED center, is it safe to say that would be a large part of the cost of building downtown.

      IIT that it easy to see that $10 or $20 million for the land necessary to build this new school could go a long way (if not completely replace) the money needed for the Ivy Tech portion?

      IIT that by building at USI that the medical school would be virtually guaranteed of almost unlimited land that would probably cost NOTHING for future expansion?

      IIT that the current IU-MED under-graduate school has been at USI from back in the day when it was still called ISUE, so we are talking probably 40 years or more. What about tradition?

      IIT that placing the IU MED school project on the USI campus would GUARANTEE a huge amount of nearby infrastructure building and improving, even up to the point you might even see a hospital on the Westside of Evansville?

      IIT that “fighting like the dickens” for a location that is expensive, and also in a neighborhood that frankly sucks, is a mistake, an that using the IU MED school as an excuse to “revitalize” downtown is a fantasy gamble that should have never been left to the politicians.

      IMHO

      • In our honest opinion as far as the revenue base is concerned (kicker here) “or represented” getting the most facility for the budgeted cost is the only pathway. The people sporting “the dickens” there seem cut and bail types when observed from the daily pass overhead.
        Confusion of the goals and set objectives for IU and its future graduates is the farthest thing from their overly self conscious minds. Question, what is the essence of this project supposed to accomplish due its revenue expenditures?
        “Everybody knows that answer”, and its final essence is already a standing diminished valuation for the School the Evansville revenue base as its been sited on a failed logistically, and failed environmentally infrastructure.

        Apparently the entire Vanderburgh county local leadership has no conception of what modern throughput logistics can produce per funded dollar.
        One would think Shetler would, I mean gees Atlas basically is a logistics based company or they would be dirt busted by now. The others are heavily involved in real estate brokerage, that explains allot as well.

        Thank you for your comment Classy! Idol minds produce nothing for they cannot project a solution, and responding to a well place response always engages ones logical side to search to the deep essence of any situation. 🙂

    • V–are you looking for Common Sense? Sorry,– but it has been the commodity in painfully short supply in Local Leadership for quite a few years now. The “well is dry”. Just Mud, Politico Greed, and CSO sludge is left.
      That’s Nothing to build a future on , no matter how much Bonded debt is piled upon the population.

      • Crash, we do agree on the bullet points, however we still think the overall southwestern Indiana metro plan is feasible. Only with the right plan, and that plan executed with the strictest of social economic environmental standards available anywhere in the United States. Or the planet for that matter. The bailing out the old block of CSO cronies and projects of the past and present will do little to confirm a solid operational future for that Zip code.

        Vision forward is a science based gift. No ribbons for Evansville on that little qualification.

        • V –given the politico history of Evansville, the potential of a feasible plan being put forward I fear, is but tilting at windmills. Intellect isn’t a factor in the equations here,– except in it’s most devious form.

    • Most people who have taken courses in Microbiology understand the Petri Dish affinity. We are like bacteria in a small petri dish we humans on this tiny spinning planet that’s whirling though space and time from the beginning to eternity.

      I like the Petri dish example but then again I excelled in microbiology from Grade school though high school and college. We can learn a lot from the worlds smaller organisms. They are the basis of all other life on earth along with the single celled algae. If not for them and their poly-peptides and amino acid chains we would have never developed into what we are today. There are only four base acids that make up all DNA chains. All one has to do is chain their order and positions a little bit to make new proteins. Mother nature takes care of the rest.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peptide

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amino_acid

      http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=petri+dish&qpvt=petri+dish&qpvt=petri+dish&FORM=IGRE

      http://www.bing.com/search?FORM=SKY2DF&PC=SKY2&q=images+of+earth+from+space&src=IE-SearchBox

      • I liked his comparison too. I don’t always agree with him but we’re fortunate to have him on the council. I think I became acquainted with the term in 4th grade with a Gilbert’s Chemistry Set.

      • Yeah no kidding I’ve witnessed this time bomb personally and some of the crews actually used the ole petri dish as well.
        This planet will not afford the convenience of non compliance much longer, by that I’m talking 20 year incremental spans. Bid changes ahead , lots of recovered science and daily observation is going into this. The best thing that zip can do now is build throughput and eliminate the destruction of what’s left of North Americas clean water balance. Due your CSO problems to the Ohio River drainage basin.
        Nothing on the project list from that zip code is one iota close to achieving a real plan. Sad.
        Petri dish indeed, personally I think the ole doc whiplash is taking in too much methane lately his flash point is lowering. The guys a political flip out, any MD in medicine today knows the ongoing toxicity emanating from that rotten infrastructure in old downtown Evansville.

        emanate
        verb em·a·nate \ˈem-ə-ˌnāt\ (Medical Dictionary)
        em·a·nat·edem·a·nat·ing
        Medical Definition of EMANATE

        intransitive verb
        : to come out from a source
        transitive verb
        : to give out or emit

        http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2385415/Melting-polar-ice-caps-kill-creatures-live-sea-floor-smothering-seaweed.html

  9. Thank you Doc Adams for coming to Evansville, IN and trying to bring up out of the jungle and into the light. Team work is always a good thing. People should and need to always work as a team. And you have grasped this concept and are trying to expand it to the new medical doctor students and other’s in the health field.

    Congratulations on your election to the City Council Presidency and I wish you well being in the years to come. The IU medical schools campus in Evansville, IN should brighten the future of all of us in the Tri State area of Southern, IN, Illinois and Kentucky as well.

    I hope you still take some time off your busy schedule to play some Huff and Puff Ice Hockey! LOL

  10. Dr.Dan Adams ALWAYS goes above and beyond. I can not commend him enough for what he has done to better our/his city.

  11. Latest odds/percentages for Tuesday:
    City Clerk R

    Stricklin 47
    Strouth 53

    City Clerk D

    Hart 38
    Wyndhorst 62

    6th Ward

    Brinkmeyer 55%
    Lindsey 45%

    At Large D

    Weaver 95%
    Adams 90%
    O’Daniel 87%
    Burton <10%

    and the marquee matchup

    2nd Ward D

    Davis 52%
    Mosby 48%

  12. Ok Weaver, nice try but pure unadulterated BS. Just like you squirt , what’s going to carry you when the smart city people boot you out?

  13. Weaver has no clue who I am, but I have been reading books since 1975. My lover said I wouldn’t live very long but I surprised a lot of people.

    • In nineteen seventy five I didn’t have time to read anymore, I put my skills as an American Airman to the test evacuating good people from southeast Asia. I survived that and many calls to duty since, I only credit that to my exemplary training and my internal spirit to promote freedom.
      The story adds to itself in later life when one meets the very people one freed moved forward.
      On a dark day back then the ultimate reality of war had almost consumed me. Real close stuff, my heritage and training combined somewhat is what saved me and my comrades that gruesome day.
      The words from my WWII Veteran father, My AAF uncles, US NAVY uncles and those of my Grandfathers pushed me forward during those dreadful days. War is truly hell, and especially when the innocents die and suffer from the political social incursions. That’s a hard thing to see smell ,and have memories set forward with.
      My solstice moment always takes me back to those days. We as an crew were flawless that day, we saved so many lives, their heritage and history forward.
      Yeah, Spring 1975, a closure for some but a vision for some who were there.

      Its was very disturbing to see the suffering, and hopelessness in those we were evacuating.
      In Cambodia the onslaught from the genocidal Pol Pot Khmer Rouge genocide was as horrible as anything the Nazis did in their death camps. That experience drove us to succeed in the assistance to get those people in South Vietnam the hell away from all that. Tough days and trying times, but we accomplished that mission as ordered and beyond without any regret.
      I absolutely hate it when someone questioned a persons service to country.
      People who serve follow orders, its what they do, and by doing that they reserve the right for those that don’t to bitch and moan about the life they have in the whole profile of the freedoms given and defended in the United States of America.
      In your town alone people who were evacuated have been sponsored by faith based Orgs. And they jumped into society there and opened some really nice Asian themed local restaurants.
      I even know of one young fella that moved forward into Electrical engineering through UE there and is one very successful fella in the field in the country now . However being really a forward thinker has moved himself and his immediate family from the Evansville regional when the die was casted over productive manufacturing within your county.

      He’s in south Texas now and absolutely thriving. That’s a good feeling for a old Veteran , a chaplain Jesuit Priest told me I would see that some day for all the efforts and suffering we went through to complete our missions. He nailed it, it took years to surface, but yes he nailed it. We did good. And no one can take that.

  14. Dan,
    Your letter I just read in the CCO to a member of our state legislature is spot on. Your assessment of the future needs in medicine are exactly correct. And we will all be the beneficiaries of this type of care assuming it is taught, promoted and provided very soon. But what is it going to take? I don’t want this to be a crap shoot. Frankly I am too damn old for playing games. Let’s take some things off the table so that this grand and necessary idea for the new med center can be fulfilled. Take away this beat-to-death, half-baked hotel idea and take that money to support the med center. Find the best location in this geographic area and by that I mean what is really the best location considering the total picture: land, proximity to other needed programs and facilities, money saved by placement in certain areas of the county, projection of space for future growth, and much more. Can everyone please get off this one trick pony of downtown and promote this project for the sake of all the citizens of this area? If the state sees that we have committed our soul to this, then I think they will step up. (Although that may be a poor statement considering the way our state government has been acting lately, it is a probability none the less.) I would like to be able to say that in my lifetime I have seen a change in the character and maturity of our government, both city and state. This may be the first step to that end.
    Sincerely,
    Martha Crosley
    Please pass this on to Mayor Winnecke. I am not privy to his email address.
    THIS IS AN EMAIL I JUST SENT TO DAN ADAMS AND CC’ed TO SOME OTHER CITY COUNCIL MEMBERS. MY FRUSTRATION LEVEL IS VERY HIGH WITH THE CITIZENS BEING PAWNS IN THIS GAME OF BUILD DOWNTOWN AT ALL COSTS. YOU CAN’T FORCE SOME THINGS. IT JUST DOES NOT WORK.

    • Good ideas ,and good advice for that places local citizens progress. That downtown is garbage infrastructure, they’ve neglected the fix until it comes to this. The future of the youth and the affordability given them lays on the right decision. Our group doesn’t see that happening under your present local leadership. State leadership maybe, considering the latest round of unconstitutional boners they’ve sported, I wouldn’t count on them “so much” either.

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