All in the family: R. Whit Curry Jr.’s dedication to primary care practice and teaching inspires students, faculty

Ask R. Whit Curry Jr., M.D., why he chose to specialize in family practice medicine, and he’ll likely tell you that it all comes down to a lowly ingrown toenail.

Curry, who has served as chairman of UF’s department of community health and family medicine for 11 years, trained in internal medicine at Stanford University and was practicing in a small rural community in North Carolina as part of the National Health Service Corps during the Vietnam era. He’d been at the clinic for a few months when a patient arrived in the exam room, complaining of a tender toe.

“I looked at it, and I wasn’t sure what to do,” he said. “I took the patient over to the old general practitioner next door, and he showed me how to take care of an ingrown toenail.”

For Curry, it was a defining moment. For all the satisfaction that comes from caring for complex, challenging medical ailments, sometimes the simple problems can be just as gratifying to solve. From that point on, he dedicated his career to family practice and to teaching.

“Being in practice in the real world, so to speak, was a real eye-opener for me,” Curry said. “I had a couple ‘awakenings’ if you will, one being that I thought the way we trained physicians in family medicine was the best approach to taking care of patients in the real world of anything I’d seen in all my training to that date. The second thing I learned was that I enjoyed practicing much more when I had students with me. I had students come out from UNC and Duke to do rotations with us. That’s when I became convinced that I wanted to be a teacher rather than just a practicing physician, and I decided that family medicine was the best way to do it. I came back came to UF and did a fellowship, and I’ve been here ever since.”

Teaching has taken on even greater importance as medical students nationwide have increasingly shunned primary care medicine for other specialties, Curry said.

“We’re anticipating nationwide reaching a crisis point not too far down the road,” Curry said. “We haven’t seen much of a decrease in interest among our own medical students at UF, but it has certainly happened nationwide. We’ve always felt it was real important to do the best we can as teachers with our own medical students, and I think the impact of that shows.”

Curry, who twice has been named the UF College of Medicine’s Family Practice Residency Program Teacher of the Year, leads small group discussions as part of courses focused on social and ethical issues, essentials of patient care and evidence-based medicine. He also serves as the department’s residency program inpatient attending physician and teaches third-year medical students at the West Oaks clinic.

Curry has been involved with the residency program almost since its inception in 1973; he joined the UF faculty in 1976. Nearly 180 residents have graduated from the program; most practice in Florida.

At last count, about two-thirds of the family physicians in Gainesville — about 50 physicians — are UF graduates, Curry said. “That’s another accomplishment we feel pretty good about,” he said. “We’ve populated the city with family physicians.

“I do a fair amount of teaching,” added Curry, who described his style as egalitarian and encouraging. “My philosophy of leadership is that it’s important to lead by doing, and so I’m fairly active teaching at both the resident and the medical-student level. But I’m probably most inspired by the excellent teachers on my own faculty, a number of whom are far better teachers than I am.”

Bolstering the department’s educational initiatives and solidifying a presence in the outpatient and hospital arenas have been two of Curry’s key goals since he assumed the chairmanship. But he also sets his sights on forging a stronger research enterprise. The clinical trials program is growing, Curry said, and plans call for recruiting a faculty member devoted primarily to research.

“The department’s clinical sites, activities and diverse patient population provide a rich source of data for research in the areas of health behavior, medical ethics, evidence-based medicine, community health promotion and outpatient pharmaceutical research,” he said. His own research includes a number of pharmaceutical studies. He also assists faculty with their research projects. In the past year, the department received a grant to implement a program in end-of-life care.

Among his many accomplishments, Curry is credited with helping to establish the Faculty Group Practice clinics at Haile Plantation and West Oaks.

“When I started as chair, the only clinic we had was the residency program clinic and a rural clinic,” he said. “And I think probably the other accomplishment I feel good about is recruiting and supporting faculty members who have gotten involved in as many teaching activities and have done as good a job at teaching as they have. I’ve always felt like my job was basically to do whatever I can to empower the rest of the faculty to maximize their potential, so I’ve always seen my job as trying to help them and provide them with the tools they need to do the best job they can do. And I think that has worked out pretty well for the group of people that we have.”

Curry provides direct patient care at West Oaks, mentors residents in their patient care at Family Practice Medical Group, and serves as attending physician on inpatient services at Shands at AGH. He also is medical director for Shands Occupational Health Services, a clinic for employees, and chairman of the Student Health Care Center’s student health advisory board.

In the past year, the department launched the Community Inpatient Service, a major new program at Shands at AGH.

“We anticipated we’d be taking care of 30 to 40 patients a day and it turns out it’s been 70 to 80 patients a day, and that’s in addition to our other inpatient service for the residency program that’s been there a long time, which typically has 30 to 35 patients,” he said. “We’ve had over 100 patients a day at AGH now for months. And so recruiting physicians and setting up all the logistics of working that service has been a challenge.”

Curry said the department is now recruiting six new faculty members to help run the service. All should be on board by July.

For the past year, Curry has served as medical director of a Medicaid program co-sponsored by the Agency for Health Care Administration and Pfizer called Florida: A Health State. The program links high-risk Medicaid patients who have chronic illnesses with a case manager to teach them about healthy behaviors, better monitor their ailments and help them avoid hospital and emergency room visits.

Curry also has a longstanding interest in diabetes and is involved with a national educational group that disseminates information about the disease to patients and practitioners.

He also is medical editor of the daily consumer health series “Health In A Heartbeat,” which airs on 65 National Public Radio affiliates nationwide and is sponsored by Shands HealthCare, the Health Science Center and WUFT-FM radio.

The son of a radiologist, Curry—a native of Bradenton—first pondered a career in engineering.

“I always liked the scientific side of things,” he said. “In college I discovered I had a certain facility with chemistry and biology and the science courses, and so I guess somewhere around my freshman or sophomore year I began to realize that medicine offered me the opportunity to combine the science that I loved with something that allowed me to interact with people and help people, and contribute in an positive sense.”

He spent a summer or two working as a scrub nurse in an Orlando hospital before graduating from UF with a bachelor’s in chemistry and earned his medical degree from Duke University Medical School. He is board certified by the American Board of Internal Medicine and the American Board of Family Practice and is a fellow of the American College of Physicians and the American Academy of Family Physicians. Curry has been listed repeatedly in “The Best Doctors in America,” “Who’s Who in Medicine” and “Guide to America’s Top Physicians.” He has numerous publications to his credit, including two books, and also serves on various journal editorial boards.

As a family practitioner, it makes sense that outside the Health Science Center, Curry’s focus is on his family. He and his wife, Ruthanne, a recently retired family nurse practitioner, enjoy running and spending time with their son, Robert, their 15-month-old granddaughter, Emma, their daughter, Mary, and her husband, all of whom live in Gainesville. The families like to visit their second home in St. Augustine. Recently, they celebrated Robert’s graduation from UF’s journalism program.

Robert, who has cerebral palsy, now is deciding whether to find a job or go to graduate school.

“He still lives at home and uses a wheelchair, so issues of independent living will be the next hurdle for us,” Curry said. “I think all physicians need to have some encounters with the health-care system as a patient rather than as a provider. I think having done so you have a more empathetic perspective and hopefully a little more understanding perception of what it’s like to be a patient.”

Department of Community Health and Family Medicine

Faculty: About 41 full-time faculty members in Gainesville

Department budget: Approximately $10 million

Patient visits: Department faculty log about 50,000 patient visits annually, excluding the Student Health Care Center, where another 100,000 visits occur each year.

Programs: The department oversees the Family Practice Residency programs in Gainesville and Jacksonville, the family practice clinic in Jacksonville, the family practice physicians at the Eastside Community Practice, and clinics in the Faculty Group Practice at Fanning Springs, Haile Plantation, West Oaks and the Family Practice Medical Group. Additional departmental initiatives include UF’s Program in Bioethics, Law and Medical Professionalism; the medical directorship at the Tacachale Center of Excellence; UF’s Agro-Medicine Program; and providing physicians to staff the Student Health Care Center at UF.