CRESTVIEW — North Okaloosa County is poised to benefit from Florida International University’s physician assistant program, which received accreditation last week.
The Miami-based Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine program will welcome its first class of 45 or 50 students in August. Fifteen months later, students will be eligible to begin clinical rotations at North Okaloosa Medical Center.
“It was almost a three-and-a-half-year ordeal” to receive the Accreditation Review Commission's blessing, said Dr. Pete Gutierrez, PA program director and associate dean. “No program can just start unless they give the OK.”
Although accreditation makes the core program possible, a full, hoped-for shared program in Crestview can't come for five more years. ACR rules require schools to wait five years after initial accreditation before opening a satellite site.
But that won’t stop FIU from offering clinical rotations here. Toward that end, Gutierrez said, the men and other visiting FIU officials looked at “three or four buildings” to establish their initial presence last week.
“The idea is to send them (students) here to do their entire rotation,” he said. “We want the kids to get the same medical experience they will get in Miami.”
The progress is promising, said Gutierrez, founding chairman of the Master in Physician Assistant Studies program. “We are underserved by PAs,” The Veterans Administration alone needs 28,000 physician assistants in their medical system, he said.
Former state senator Durell Peaden, Gutierrez, FIU Director of Facilities Operations JoséRodriguez and other officials toured the Crestview area Monday morning. The men also met with Dr. Margareth Lacrosse-Pierre, director of the downtown Florida A&M University Rural Diversity Health Care Center, where they discussed collaborating with FAMU’s remote learning classrooms.
Based on his experience serving in the Air Force at Eglin Air Force Base, Gutierrez said once word about the Emerald Coast’s lure gets out among PA program students, “I think all 45 of them will want to come here.”
Email News Bulletin Staff Writer Brian Hughes, follow him on Twitter or call 850-682-6524.
This article originally appeared on Crestview News Bulletin: FIU PA program accredited: Students arrive in Crestview in '16