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New Training Concept

Medical Center Opens Family Clinic

The University announced yesterday
that it will begin operating a special clinic
to offer health care to whole families at
its Medical Center later this month.

The family clinic will be a major
training unit of the School of Medicine's new
division of family and community medicine.

Operating on a limited basis at first for
patients who are presently receiving health care
from no other source, the clinic eventually
would encompass a cross section of population,
ranging from the indigent to perhaps a prepaid
group. In the beginning stages the clinic will
operate on a fee-for-service basis.

New Quarters

While it will be operated initially through
the internal medicine and pediatrics departments'
facilities, the clinic will be shifted in
early 1971 to quarters in a building now being
constructed by a private contractor across
Jefferson Park Ave. from the Medical Center.

Director of the clinic will be Richard W.
Lindsay, assistant professor of internal medicine.
He said that the clinic's "job is to render
comprehensive family care-for parents and
children, with an option offered for dental
care."

Under the program outlined, the clinic
would offer such widely varied services as
well-baby examinations, electrocardiograms and
immunizations. "We would do what any family
practitioner does, including taking care of acute
problems as they arise and referring patients to
specialists as the need arises," said Dr. Lindsay.

Family Practice

In addition to using the clinic to explore
new means of delivering and financing medical
care, the clinic also would offer the School of
Medicine a new way of training more family
practitioners.

"We are interested both in stimulating interest
in family practice among medical students
and in providing means of training people who
are already interested," Dr. Lindsay said. While
in the initial stages of the program he will be
assisted by Donald J. Waldowski, assistant
professor of pediatrics, the staff will be expanded
as the program grows.

Basic to the program, once it is located in its
permanent headquarters, would be the use of
such paramedical personnel as nurse clinicians.

"American medicine is shorthanded. The use
of paramedical personnel is an obvious and
feasible solution," according to Dr. Lindsay.

Residency Program

Eventually, the program may also include a
three-year residency in family practice, offered
through the School of Medicine's new division
of family and community medicine. The Virginia
Academy of General Practice has provided
advice in developing both the clinic and the
proposed residency program.

Edward Hook, chairman of the department
of internal medicine and co-director of the new
division of family and community medicine
with pediatrics chairman William G. Thurman,
said, "Medical schools have traditionally had
difficulties teaching ambulatory medicine.
Since so much of being a physician involves
ambulatory care and teaching," Dr. Hook said.

He warned, however, against concluding that
the training of more family specialists will solve
the problem of too few rural physicians:

"While such a program may have an effect
on this, it is important to point out that solving
rural health problems is another thing because
in the past doctors, irrespective of training,
have tended to go to urban areas."

Health Care

The clinic is one operation of the University's
developing Center for the Delivery of
Health Care designed to demonstrate mechanisms
of health care delivery, principally in rural
areas, and methods of expanding training opportunities.