Hospital unveils medical student program with thanks and a little basketball

FARMINGTON – From beginning to end, the ceremony was about teamwork.

Franklin Memorial Hospital kicked off a partnership with Maine Medical Center and the Tufts University’s School of Medicine with a dedication event on this blustery Friday afternoon. Local doctors, hospital administrators and representatives from other members of the collaborative medical education program met to the unveiling of the partnership’s local residence.

The building has been named “The Dixon House,” after David Dixon, FCHN vice president, doctor and tireless advocate for the program, but several medical students will call it simply “home,” when the residency partnership begins hosting would-be doctors.

“We look forward to doing wonderful things together,” Peter Bates, academic dean of the Medical Arts Center/Tufts University program, told the crowd. “It’s going to be a great ride.”

The program allows students to spend two years at Tufts University, in Boston, with rotations in Maine, prior to transitioning to Maine Medical Center for their third year of medical school. In that third year, students will work at one of four rural hospitals, including Franklin Memorial Hospital. Their focus while at FMH will be the practice of medicine in a small town.

Dixon, declared “instigator and advocate” of the program during a pronouncement by FCHN President Rebecca Ryder, said he was “totally surprised” by the dedication. Ryder recounted a story, that while she was still in Texas after accepting the job as president of FCHN, she received a call from Dixon, asking about the future of the partnership program.

“This really is our future,” Dixon said, before joking, “I don’t really mind being a part of that.”

As stated in prepared remarks by Sen. Olympia Snowe (R – Maine) and Rep. Michael Michaud (D – Maine), which were read to the audience, Maine is running low on general care practitioners. Doctors, Snowe noted in her letter, were more likely to practice medicine near where they undertook their residencies, and programs that brought more medical students into the community were a positive step.

The house, located at 663 Wilton Road just off the hospital campus, was formerly owned by Estella McLean and her husband, Bud, who lived there for 53 years. Estella McLean, a University of Maine at Farmington professor of physical education and coach of both field hockey and basketball teams and then a longtime basketball coach at Mt. Blue Middle School, was at the ceremony. Hospital administrators and doctors, in honor of the new partnership and McLean’s history, laced up green-and-white sneakers to be played through a ceremonial partnership drill.

“One of the ways we’ll manage this healthcare crisis,” said FCHN Vice President Gerald Cayer, who was actually coached by McLean while at UMF in the 1980s, “is working together in teams.”

The house is connected to the hospital campus by a path that winds its way through the surrounding pine trees.