FAU loses most of its clinical sites

[polymerization]

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From the Sun Sentinel: FAU-Broward Health medical partnership implodes, leaves students scrambling

Without their Broward and Memorial hospitals, the entire school is being serviced by Baptist Boca Raton Regional, Delray Medical Center, and West Boca Medical Center—losing 4 major flagship hospitals in the area, and leaving them with smaller community hospitals which might understandably lack capacity to adequately train the >200 medical students undergoing rotations at present (and more important, major tertiary/quaternary care sites that housed specialty electives).

I'm aware we're basically speculating here, but I think there are obvious considerations for applicants who may have plans to attend in 2026, no? I imagine this could impact LCME/ACGME accreditation.

Worse, the possibility of delayed graduation for students and perhaps even implications for their ERAS apps.

What do you all think?

 

[doctorendgame]

Sounds like a negotiating tactic to me. One positive thing from Trump's presidency is I've gotten very good at spotting negotiating tactics.

Your title is very misleading by the way. They didn't lose it. They were the ones who terminated the partnership.

FAU Suddenly Ends Contract with Broward Health Over Financial terms | Cat Country 107.1

Florida Atlantic University suddenly severed its 30-year contract with Broward Health after only 2 years.

catcountry1071.iheart.com

 

[polymerization]

Sounds like a negotiating tactic to me. One positive thing from Trump's presidency is I've gotten very good at spotting negotiating tactics.

Your title is very misleading by the way. They didn't lose it. They were the ones who terminated the partnership.

FAU Suddenly Ends Contract with Broward Health Over Financial terms | Cat Country 107.1

Florida Atlantic University suddenly severed its 30-year contract with Broward Health after only 2 years.

catcountry1071.iheart.com

From my perspective as a student, I'm not sure the health systems "lose" anything. Baptist, Memorial, and Broward Health benefit from partnerships with nearby FIU HWCOM (and NSU MD/DO) in addition to FAU and actually don't need FAU students to have legitimacy as academic/teaching hospitals. If FAU is refusing to compensate what are ultimately their professors, it is their own reputation on the line. It's by far already the smallest medical school in the state, and so any number of professors leaving the faculty is a huge deal.

To go as far as saying that it is a negotiation tactic is an interesting view...but suspending disbelief and assuming that is true looks even worse. Not only do they have a public catfight with some of the most trusted hospital systems in the region, but it would seem to be a very petty and off-putting move on their part from the vantage of their students, who believed they were going with a solid state school with scant but reliable options for home residency programs.

All for "regulatory" issues? To me (and it is only an opinion), it looks a whole lot like stabbing the students and expecting hospital executives to bleed. So it goes.

 

[DocEspana]

Sounds like a negotiating tactic to me. One positive thing from Trump's presidency is I've gotten very good at spotting negotiating tactics.

Your title is very misleading by the way. They didn't lose it. They were the ones who terminated the partnership.

FAU Suddenly Ends Contract with Broward Health Over Financial terms | Cat Country 107.1

Florida Atlantic University suddenly severed its 30-year contract with Broward Health after only 2 years.

catcountry1071.iheart.com

From my perspective as a student, I'm not sure the health systems "lose" anything. Baptist, Memorial, and Broward Health benefit from partnerships with nearby FIU HWCOM (and NSU MD/DO) in addition to FAU and actually don't need FAU students to have legitimacy as academic/teaching hospitals. If FAU is refusing to compensate what are ultimately their professors, it is their own reputation on the line. It's by far already the smallest medical school in the state, and so any number of professors leaving the faculty is a huge deal.

To go as far as saying that it is a negotiation tactic is an interesting view...but suspending disbelief and assuming that is true looks even worse. Not only do they have a public catfight with some of the most trusted hospital systems in the region, but it would seem to be a very petty and off-putting move on their part from the vantage of their students, who believed they were going with a solid state school with scant but reliable options for home residency programs.

All for "regulatory" issues? To me (and it is only an opinion), it looks a whole lot like stabbing the students and expecting hospital executives to bleed. So it goes.

Physician in the community here. The gossip in the lunch rooms is that the president at FAU is, and I don't think it's political or unfair to say this, a completely unqualified political appointment with no reason to be running a medical school or a large university. And as a completely unqualified political appointment he thought he could break contracts and renegotiate things on the fly and his close ties with desantis would give him leverage over the hospitals. When the hospitals either 1) didn't care and ignored his negotiating tactics or 2) actually wrenched control from him instead using the very clauses in the contract when he didn't fulfill his end of the deal, he just took his toys (students) and "went home."

So maybe technically FAU ended the partnership, but it is because he tried to strong arm these two massive hospitals from a position of weakness thinking his name and influence would be enough and the hospitals just ignored him, and now his students pay the price that he is butthurt over that.

 

[polymerization]

Physician in the community here. The gossip in the lunch rooms is that the president at FAU is, and I don't think it's political or unfair to say this, a completely unqualified political appointment with no reason to be running a medical school or a large university. And as a completely unqualified political appointment he thought he could break contracts and renegotiate things on the fly and his close ties with desantis would give him leverage over the hospitals. When the hospitals either 1) didn't care and ignored his negotiating tactics or 2) actually wrenched control from him instead using the very clauses in the contract when he didn't fulfill his end of the deal, he just took his toys (students) and "went home."

So maybe technically FAU ended the partnership but it's because he tried to strong arm these two massive hospitals from a position of weakness and thought his name and influence would be enough and the hospitals just ignored him and now his students pay the price that he is butthurt over that.

That was my hunch. To be fair, FIU also had a recently "installed" president that did not obstruct a major academic partnership that added home residency programs to their academic offerings.

What an enormous disappointment for FAU students.

 

[doctorendgame]

Huh?

I said earlier that this is a negotiating tactic because I've gotten good at spotting negotiating tactics because of Trump's tariffs threats and have been able to easily predict what he was up to with them and the outcome because I'm very literate in politics. But this is vastly different from politics so I can't say for sure what the outcome will be and I compared it to Trump's recent 100% tariff on China where I am fully confident in my prediction, but not so much here because I don't know what variables to analyze.

 

[wysdoc]

A few off topic comments were removed- let’s keep this thread on the news about FAU please

 

[Med Ed]

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

 

[polymerization]

I guess they must have been reading because they just sent me an II.

 

[JustPleaseAcceptMe]

Am currently a student at FAU. It's not that big of deal, as we actually have small class sizes in 70s, and plenty of extra spots at other sites. Most feedback I had heard previously about Broward Health is negative experiences for their clinical rotations. There's some shady stuff going on behind the scenes with Broward Health and Memorial, as they both appointed the same CEO to circumvent the required legislation for them to merge together, while HCA is lobbying for them to merge, which makes me think the state wants to sell them off to HCA to avoid the money they're hemorrhaging. It looks like the current plan is to expand north in Palm Beach County instead which honestly would have made more sense from the get go as there isn't 4+ medical schools rotating through the same hospital system.

Pasted below are what some other students posted online on reddit that explains the situation in a little more detail:

Originally FAU had slots for 112 students across all of its MS3 sites. There’s about 80 MS3’s, so there’s some redundancy built into the system. We also have affiliations with other hospitals in the area such as Holy Cross, Cleveland Clinic Florida, Good Samaritan, Jupiter Medical Center, and the Palm Beach VA—which previously were designated as M4 only. Nobody is being left out in the rain without a rotation sites site as of now.

Even with losing these hospitals, there are still several other hospitals that FAU students rotate at (Boca Regional, Bethesda Hospital, Cleveland Clinic, Delray Medical Center, St. Mary's, Holy Cross), with the FAU residencies being based out of Boca and Bethesda mostly. It certainly sucks for students who have rotations scheduled at the lost sites to have to suddenly be shuffled around to new hospitals and to lose future training opportunities there, but with having a class size of only around 80 they'll be able to make it work

 

[polymerization]

Am currently a student at FAU. It's not that big of deal, as we actually have small class sizes in 70s, and plenty of extra spots at other sites. Most feedback I had heard previously about Broward Health is negative experiences for their clinical rotations. There's some shady stuff going on behind the scenes with Broward Health and Memorial, as they both appointed the same CEO to circumvent the required legislation for them to merge together, while HCA is lobbying for them to merge, which makes me think the state wants to sell them off to HCA to avoid the money they're hemorrhaging. It looks like the current plan is to expand north in Palm Beach County instead which honestly would have made more sense from the get go as there isn't 4+ medical schools rotating through the same hospital system.

Pasted below are what some other students posted online on reddit that explains the situation in a little more detail:

Originally FAU had slots for 112 students across all of its MS3 sites. There’s about 80 MS3’s, so there’s some redundancy built into the system. We also have affiliations with other hospitals in the area such as Holy Cross, Cleveland Clinic Florida, Good Samaritan, Jupiter Medical Center, and the Palm Beach VA—which previously were designated as M4 only. Nobody is being left out in the rain without a rotation sites site as of now.

Even with losing these hospitals, there are still several other hospitals that FAU students rotate at (Boca Regional, Bethesda Hospital, Cleveland Clinic, Delray Medical Center, St. Mary's, Holy Cross), with the FAU residencies being based out of Boca and Bethesda mostly. It certainly sucks for students who have rotations scheduled at the lost sites to have to suddenly be shuffled around to new hospitals and to lose future training opportunities there, but with having a class size of only around 80 they'll be able to make it work

Very interesting! Thanks for sharing; I see you're not generally vocal on SDN, so I really appreciate you signing in just to give us your take.

To be fair, on my interview day, someone in my cohort made the rookie mistake of actually asking the educational affairs dean about the situation in open session. There was a lot of hand-wringing and "I'm so glad you asked that" followed by what was, in my estimation, ostensibly not a response.

It seemed even more disingenuous given that the presentation they had just given included all of the Broward and Memorial locations they lost, so it was very amusing to see the pivot in real time. Part of me even felt bad for them, despite the very valid question.

Hoping you guys are hanging in there. If you hear anything else, let us know!

 

[wysdoc]

Very interesting! Thanks for sharing; I see you're not generally vocal on SDN, so I really appreciate you signing in just to give us your take.

To be fair, on my interview day, someone in my cohort made the rookie mistake of actually asking the educational affairs dean about the situation in open session. There was a lot of hand-wringing and "I'm so glad you asked that" followed by what was, in my estimation, ostensibly not a response.

It seemed even more disingenuous given that the presentation they had just given included all of the Broward and Memorial locations they lost, so it was very amusing to see the pivot in real time. Part of me even felt bad for them, despite the very valid question.

Hoping you guys are hanging in there. If you hear anything else, let us know!

definitely would have been good to edit their slide deck on that detail 😳

 

[polymerization]

definitely would have been good to edit their slide deck on that detail 😳

I was tickled by it, to say the least. When the applicant asked the question, you could see exactly which applicants didn't know about this based on their instant reactions on camera. They even ended the interview day early. I have to reiterate that it looked so bad that I genuinely felt for them. It didn't seem like the people being asked to justify the decisions the school made had any hand in making those decisions in the first place.