Forrest General Hospital Family Medicine Residency Program Celebrates 10th Anniversary

HATTIESBURG, Miss. – (July 02, 2024) As the Forrest General Hospital Family Medicine Residency Program prepares to graduate one class of residents and welcome another class to the program, its tenth, it is also celebrating a milestone – a 10-year anniversary. It was in July 2014 when the program admitted its first class of residents.

It took longer to get the program started than it did for that first group of residents to complete the three-year residency program, but if you ask, it was well worth the wait.

Bill Oliver, who served as Forrest General Hospital CEO from 1997 until 2009, was instrumental in introducing the program, not once, but twice, before the ball started rolling. It was Oliver’s hope that the Forrest General program would be an answer to the growing number of primary care physicians retiring in the Pine Belt.

Oliver came to FGH in 1997 from his post as CFO/COO of Emory University Hospital in Atlanta. “I had been involved in a teaching program (at Emory), so I felt Forrest General might be ready to start exploring (a Family Medicine Residency program),” said Oliver. “I was probably a little early, in that when I met with the medical staff they really didn’t see the need for it. Our primary care coverage was pretty good at the time, and the specialists, who would be involved with a lot of the training, weren’t totally engaged that they would be ready to do this.” Oliver pushed the idea to the back burner.

When Evan Dillard came on board as Oliver’s COO in 2008, he mentioned he had good success with a residency program in Tallahassee, Fla., during his tenure as COO at Tallahassee Memorial Healthcare, and asked Oliver if he had ever thought about such a program. Dillard noted the trouble was it took lot of money to start such a program, as well as infrastructure costs. “But if you can find a way to pay for the startup, I’ll support taking it to our board,” Oliver remembers Dillard telling him.

And again, Oliver was off and running. He met with University of Mississippi Medical Center and Mississippi Academy of Family Medicine personnel to find out if there was truly a need around the state for such a program. He got a resounding “yes!” from everybody, especially primary care physicians. Family Medicine is considered the second largest medical specialty.

From there, Oliver, a group of physicians, and other supporters went to the Mississippi Legislature to find a way to get start-up money for the program. In 2012, the Office of Mississippi Physician Workforce (OMPW) was created.

The OMPW provided funding that could be used for starting and maintaining programs as well as developing programs, not just in Hattiesburg, but across the state. Forrest General was awarded the first grant, which allowed the hospital to be reimbursed for the approximately $2 to $3 million it would cost to get Forrest General’s Residency Program off the ground.

All Oliver needed to move forward was a buy-in from the FGH medical staff and a Residency Program director. In Oliver’s opinion, “Dr. Eric Hale was the role model we wanted for future Primary Care doctors. He was well respected by the specialists, and I needed somebody to convince the specialists that while it would be a little bit of a burden, in the long term it would be worth it.”

Oliver’s proposal received board support. “I had convinced Dr. Hale, who was hesitant to give up his patients, that long term, this legacy would be just as important as those patients he was taking care of. It didn’t take long, and he got it. He saw that he was developing the future of primary care.”

In an interview that Hale did with WJTV following the graduation of the first class, Hale said, “It is fantastic and speaks to the quality of our program that all of the residents in our first group are now board certified. These residents took a leap of faith to come to a new residency hoping we would offer them a good education.”

He felt the program keeping residents in the area upon completion could help strengthen the relationship between doctors and patients.

“The patient will have a doctor who not only knows their health history, but also knows that individual as a person,” said Hale. “This is what makes being a Forrest General resident special.”

Hale currently serves as an Emeritus Faculty member with the program.

Five of the six members of that first class are still practicing in and around Hattiesburg, whether Seminary, Bellevue, Columbia, or Oak Grove. One is practicing in Louisiana.

When Dillard became Forrest General Hospital president/CEO he noted that if 50 percent of each group of residents chose to stay in the Pine Belt, the program would help supply the community with 30 primary care physicians every 10 years.

According to Rambod Rouhbakhsh, MD, the current Residency Program director, three-fourths of Forrest General’s Residency Program graduates are practicing medicine in the state of Mississippi with a large majority of those being in Forrest Health’s 19-county service area. “To get these doctors to Hattiesburg, without a residency program, would have been a remarkable endeavor. It costs a lot of money to recruit a doctor to the area.”

Since 2017, Forrest General has graduated seven classes and this month will graduate its eighth class. “That’s a lot of family doctors to seed into the community with the majority being in our service area,” he said. “It’s important to have family doctors. It’s more important to have quality family doctors, and we are, at least by this standard, producing amongst the best in the country.” That’s not a hard statement to back up when you consider that the Forrest General Hospital program is ranked fourth in the nation for board scores amongst programs whose graduates all took the American Board of Family Medicine’s board examination in 2023.

Three of the past four graduating classes have scored in the 95th percentile nationally for board scores, putting the program in the top five percent. “Traditionally, we’ve been the top-scoring program in our geographic area,” Rouhbakhsh said. The last graduating class, in 2023, scored in the 99.6^th percentile, or the top 0.4% – No. 4 out of 773 Family Medicine Residency programs in the United States with nearly 11,400 residents.

Since the Forrest General Hospital program graduated its first class in 2017, there has been a 100 hundred percent board passage rate on the first attempt. “That in and of itself is an achievement we have been quite proud of,” said Rouhbakhsh. “We are among the few institutions to be able to boast that we’ve never had a failure.”

And the Office of Mississippi Physician Workforce continues to support the Forrest General program. This year it provided the program with $2,800 for Wellness & Faculty Development and $4,300 for Board Review material.

As the residency program’s role in the community has grown, the program is providing more services. According to Rouhbakhsh, the residency clinic took over employee health for FGH as well as pre-operative patient management. Every person scheduled for elective surgery at FGH comes to the residency clinic for pre-surgical evaluation.

Residents also play an integral role in the Edward’s Street Fellowship Health Clinic, where the residents are the primary workforce providing free quality healthcare to eligible uninsured and underinsured adults in Forrest and Lamar counties. This team of residents, along with other medical professionals, screeners, processors, and community partners at the clinic, were recognized for the fifth consecutive year in 2024 with the GOLD Seal for Quality Standards from the National Association of Free & Charitable Clinics.

 “Growth is all about access,” said Oliver. “I believe this. I believe my predecessor, Lowery Woodall, Evan Dillard, and current President/CEO, Andy Woodard, all believe this.

“This program is something I’m proud of, but it took so many people’s commitment to get here. I think one day we will look back and go, thank goodness we did that.

“With these new doctors we have the enthusiasm, and we wonder how we ever did without the program. If you look at the number of primary care physicians in the hospital’s 19-county service area, we have made a difference for the future. I think we have far exceeded expectations. I would say it’s been a pretty easy vision.”

That vision and these doctors continue to serve countless numbers of patients throughout Forrest Health’s 19-county service area whether in regional hospital facilities or clinics. It is just another way Forrest Health continues to provide quality health care in South Mississippi and work toward fulfilling its mission to do what is best for the patient.

For more information about Forrest General’s Hospital’s Family Medicine Residency Program, visit www.forrestgeneral.org/fmr.