An agreement between JPS Health Network and the military will put U.S. Army surgeons to work for patients, while helping them gather some beneficial real-world experience working shoulder-to-shoulder with the doctors at the only Level I Trauma Center in Tarrant County.
“This is a win for community, a win for the patients we serve, a win for the Army and a win for these doctors," JPS surgeon Forrest “Dell” Moore said of the agreement in which General Surgery residents from the Beaumont Army Medical Center will take month-long turns operating in JPS surgery suites. “We help train them, doing our patriotic duty, while the surgeons get the experience they need.”
According to a statement issued by the Program Director’s Office at Beaumont, the experience Army surgeons can get at JPS is unlike anything else they receive during their training.
“The partnership between JPS and William Beaumont Army Medical Center's General Surgery Residency Program provides Army surgical trainees with the opportunity to expand and add to their surgical experience in a busy urban trauma center with robust surgical capabilities and excellent quality surgical faculty and staff,” the statement read. “The residents' experience in this integrative environment furthers their training and capabilities, and therefore benefits the patients they will treat while serving as Active-Duty Army Surgeons.”
"This is a win for the community, a win for the patients we serve, a win for the Army and a win for these doctors."
Moore, also Vice Chief of Surgery for Acclaim Physician Group, said the Army residents are currently working one at a time. But he hopes the program will expand in the future to allow multiple doctors to work in rotations at the same time.
This isn’t the first residency program JPS has forged with the military. One previous example is a residency program created between Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery and the U.S. Navy.
Lt. Commander Dr. Jason Burkes served a residency at JPS before taking the skills he learned to Walter Reed National Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. He was followed by Lt. Commander Dr. Daniel Hammer who reported to the U.S. Navy Medical Center in San Diego to perform surgery after completing his training at the health network. That means the Oral and Maxillofacial experts at two of the three Navy surgical centers across the country completed their training at JPS, taking what they learned to benefit American soldiers, sailors and Marines in need of care.
“The goal is to try to build our relationship with the military,” Moore said. “We have gaps we’d like to fill. The more residents we have, the more our service lines can grow. Our hope is to keep it ongoing and then go from one to two to three and have more of a presence here. We want to have a relationship that no one else in the area has.”