Hey, what is happening with the Walter Reed path program with the restructuring?
Right now, nothing. Their projected date for BRAC completion varies everytime I hear about it. The earliest estimates are 2010-2012. I'll be long gone by then, and most likely, even out of the Army.
I think everyone agrees that it will be the best thing for almost everyone involved (except drivers, but then again, DC traffic is a nightmare anyway...). For our program, I think it will be a great thing. We split our time between Walter Reed and Bethesda anyway (which is a real pain-in-the-ass sometimes), so moving everything to Bethesda will be a good move for the residents.
But first they have to:
1. Build a completely new hospital in Virginia.
2. Double or triple the beds at Bethesda.
3. Vastly expand parking at Bethesda (which is bad... not Walter Reed bad, but bad enough)
The biggest concern for pathologists is the AFIP. Dissolving the AFIP would be a mistake of monumental proportions (they have 1.5 million
gross cases in their archives, 6 million slide cases... really the place is simply amazing). Just about everyone you ask would tell you that. IMO the best thing to do would be to take it from under DoD command and move it to NIH (make it the NIP perhaps?). As long as the military and VA systems still got to consult there for free, and as long as they still guaranteed training spots to military fellows.
This would be the smartest move. Only a small fraction of the AFIP staff are military, and most of those are not chair or senior departmental staff.
But again, they haven't finalized plans for anything, so everybody could forget they did the whole BRAC thing to begin with
🙂