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