Southeastern Health has become more than a health-care organization. As the largest employer in Robson County, it wields influence and significant economic impact. In conjunction with Campbell University Medical School, it is transforming itself into a card-carrying academic facility. This is significant.

The medical center is now the site of residency programs in internal medicine, family practice and emergency medicine. Residents are new physicians beginning practice after medical school and learning their area of specialty. Having residents in Robeson has value.

The medical value is obvious. Research demonstrates patients benefit and have better outcomes at academic centers. Active collaboration and teaching atmospheres simply lead to better care. Patients are still seen by supervising attending physicians. But a team approach, combined with eager, newly minted physicians, is a good thing.

What the public doesn’t see are daily lectures, grand rounds and ongoing research that accompany being an academic center and has benefit. A complete new environment emerges.

There is also the economic impact. More residents are added each year, committing themselves to the community. Studies show that many residents end up practicing not far from their residency training. It also attracts specialists who thrive at academic centers.

The importance of this transition cannot be understated, as it must be understood where this is going in a political and economic sense, which transcends the medical benefits.

Robeson is unique in regards to the residency programs situated here. There are only five other emergency medicine residency programs in the state, for example. Four are associated with major university campuses and one is a large private xampus in Charlotte.

Robeson is the only rural center. But Robeson has one of the largest volumes of patients in the state and has incredible pathology, requiring academic level care. Which means it is a win-win for the community and the new doctors training here.

As an emerging academic campus, the medical center expands its regional influence and image. It becomes a magnet for many societal benefits. The environment changes around such a center.

As an academic atmosphere emerges, rather than a place where patients come for first-line care, it becomes a tertiary center. It becomes a place where patients are referred as resources, research and experience coalescence. The point is a complex set of positive changes has been set into motion.

In 2010, the North Carolina Legislature designated Lumberton as the first certified Retirement Community in North Carolina. The range of services, amenities and opportunities earned the Governor’s Innovative Small Business Community Award as a result.

With young physicians slowly filtering into the area and retirees looking at Robeson for retirement, a balanced set of needs and economies grow. Schools to small businesses thrive around a growing center. When you factor in a $139 million Sanderson Farms plant employing over 1,000 in the county and a $1.5 billion natural gas pipeline slated to terminate here, the growing economic impact, influence and resulting image is clear at a perfect time.

It is a bit of extra work for the medical center staff and Campbell University to make all this work. It is a visionary community investment.

Some of this is also dependent on graduate medical education funding through Medicaid that is threatened for elimination in the Senate budget. This is currently being reconciled in committee, because without it costs rise and shortages occur.

Duke University grew from Durham’s Trinity College and into a leading medical center in less than 75 years. The benefit to the surrounding area is obvious.

A rising tide of such academic excellence engenders economic, political and social successes. Robeson is long overdue for such success.

In 1988, then Lumberton Mayor David Weinstein said that approving the sale of mixed beverages would boost economic growth along Interstate 95. He was right and it fueled a tourism economy during tough times. An emerging academic medical center in Robeson is just as visionary and vital — if not more.

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Phillip Stephens is chairman of the Robeson County Republican Party.

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