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"In the last six months to a year, our referral volume has increased dramatically," he said. "That means that patients don't have to leave town for these services." Horowitz, who came to Fayetteville more than two decades ago, is in a new position created to help manage the medical center's growth in surgical services across all its regional campuses. "Part of my goal is to reach out to all the different departments and ask them what their one-year plan is, their five-year plan and their 10-year plan," he said. "That's so we can see what the departments feel that they need to bring in. It's part of a constantly evolving process: to come up with a game plan as we expand." While Dr. Van Fossen is director of the surgical residency program, the entire staff participates in the residents' training. "They start off slowly and gain responsibilities as their abilities grow and increase," Dr. Horowitz said. "I've been very impressed." For now, Dr. Van Fossen's surgical program has 14 residents from as far away as Alaska and from as close to home as Fayetteville. The group is small enough that the residents have been able to foster a family-like bond within the group. They've also managed to foster confidence in their work. "They've helped us elevate the level of care," Van Fossen said. "They're able to be our eyes and ears. In many cases, we're now able to have someone there 24 hours a day and seven days a week." WORDS OF WISDOM FOR YOUNG DOCTORS Dr. Joel Horowitz, Cape Fear Valley Health's Medical Director of Surgical Ser vices, has a few words of wisdom for those entering the medical profession at such a precarious time in histor y. Which is to say, during a global pandemic. Those in the medical profession were on the frontlines of dealing with the ef fects of COVID-19. Dr. Horowitz, who graduated from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in 1988, remembers a dif ferent global health crisis. "You know there's always something," he said. "When I started my training, it was in the days when the HIV crisis first started. There's a lot of parallels to that. We didn't know what we were doing. We didn't know how to treat it, and we were afraid to operate on those patients. We were afraid if we got stuck in the operating room we may die. There was no treatment available." He said those who go into the medical profession know to expect those kinds of challenges. "There's always going to be diseases that come around that we have no treatment for at first," he said. "You're going to work through them. The way we do certain things may change forever. Eventually, there's going to be a treatment and hopefully a cure. And then the next thing will come around." 20 DestinationFAY 2021-2022

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