It’s exciting when things start coming together on a project.
As you will read in this newsletter, we’ve hired Dr. Samuel Bierner to be the founding chair of the Department of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation, a medical specialty that cares for adult and pediatric patients with disabling conditions including traumatic brain injuries, spinal cord injuries, and impairments from stroke, musculoskeletal and neurological diseases. PM&R physicians also are known as physiatrists.
As you will recall, the creation and future success of this new department is the result of a very strong collaboration with the nationally recognized rehabilitation program at Madonna, and it will utilize their new facility at Village Pointe near 180th and Burt streets as the primary teaching site for students and future residents.
Dr. Bierner comes to UNMC/Nebraska Medicine and Madonna with a strong PM&R background, serving for the past 12 years as a member of a very highly regarded PM&R program at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, where he served as the residency program director.
His selection brings instant credibility and experience to our new PM&R program. He knows what it takes to run a successful PM&R program, and I’m confident that he will provide strong leadership as we launch our program here in Omaha.
The establishment of the PM&R Department will help fill a critical gap in the health care continuum in Omaha and the region. It’s estimated that 1,300 individuals each year would quality for rehabilitation in the metro area but are currently referred to nursing homes and other facilities, because Omaha doesn’t have a rehabilitation hospital of the size and scale that is represented by the new Madonna facility.
The new 120-bed Madonna facility is scheduled to be completed late this year. It will undoubtedly take rehabilitation care to a whole new level, providing a high quality, comprehensive site for people with complex medical issues while better meeting the growing needs of our region’s aging population.
The new Madonna facility will serve as the primary training site for UNMC’s future residency program in PM&R, which will be the first in Nebraska and one of the few in the upper Midwest. Currently, there are no PM&R residency programs in Iowa, South Dakota, North Dakota, Wyoming and Montana, so it’s easy to see how the UNMC/Nebraska Medicine program will fill a void.
When Dr. Bierner arrives in April, he will begin the process of recruiting other PM&R faculty members. By the summer of 2019 or 2020, we hope to have our first PM&R residency class in place.
With its clinical, teaching and research components, the PM&R program will be a welcome addition to our state and will greatly enhance health care for people facing a long road to recovery. It will make a difference in people’s lives – exactly what an academic health science center should do.