Kevin K. Tremper, Ph.D., M.D.
As you noted from the cover, Mike de Rosayro has retired from the Department to take a position in Traverse City. Mike has made a tremendous impact on the Department over the last 20 years. He has left us with an outstanding clinical and educational program in pain management. Vildan Mullin has taken the reins as Director of the Multidisciplinary Pain Management Program to continue to provide excellent leadership to that important section of the Department. In future issues we will provide an update on the Pain Management program. Including the expanding acute pain program and the inpatient chronic pain and implantable programs.
You may have noticed there has been a gap in the Michigan Airway over the past year. This has been due to a change in some of the administrative personnel and structure in the Department. Margo Douthat who has been the primary force behind the Michigan Airway has moved to the Departments financial office. I would like to personally thank her for all the effort she has made in producing the Michigan Airway over the past ten years. With this change was an opportunity to initiate a new administrative section within the Department, Medical Informatics. It has been apparent over the past half decade that information management tools have become instrumental tools in every function of the Department. This involves finances, scheduling, research and education.
To help coordinate the optimal use of a variety of information tools we have initiated a new section which is headed medically by Dr. Paul Kazanjian, administratively by Michele Mangner with the assistance of Carey Auxier and Donna Turner. Among a host of responsibilities, this section will assume the Michigan Airway. Paul has been responsible for the recent developments on our web site and for the development of a new web site with significantly expanded functions. These functions include the residency applications, Department Tour, our sedation policies, OR policies and fellowship information.
Much of this information is available on the Internet while more restricted information is on a Department Intranet. The Internet site can be accessed via www.anes.med.mich.edu/. We will be providing a more complete description of the informatics section in an upcoming issue.
The medical school graduates have returned to Anesthesiology! The number of applicants is dramatically up and has nearly recovered from its four year “recession.” Although the popularity is back again, we have chosen to cap our residency size at 18 per year down from 24 per year previously. The graduating class size, which peaked at over 1,800 in 1995, should probably be in the range of twelve to thirteen hundred per year. Nationally, the 1999 graduating class will only be 885. There were 820 graduates in 1969! It is clear to most of you in clinical practice and academics that the nation needs more than 1,000 anesthesiologists per year to provide the services needed by our aging population. I think it is also clear that no governmental source or health care “think-tank” really knows the proper number of any of the specialists or generalists needed. Market forces appear to be affecting the numbers of Anesthesia Practitioners as they do nearly everything else in this country. The great news is that our specialty is now popular among the best and the brightest of the medical graduating class and we hope to attract those to the University of Michigan. Our expectations are very high for this upcoming match class.
Finally I would like to thank everyone who has contributed to the Robert B Sweet Professorship and also would like to announce that continued contributions have made it possible to endow a second professorship in the name of Bert La Du, M.D., Ph.D., who has been our Director of Research. In the near future we hope to be naming a new Director of Research who will fill the Bert La Du endowed professorship. Thank you again.