The Division of Orthopaedic Surgery recently hired six faculty members away from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, including its Chair of Orthopaedics Dr. William Garrett.
Garrett, president of the American Orthopaedic Society of Sports Medicine and physician for the U.S. Women's Soccer team, will coordinate sports medicine research and will practice orthopaedic sports medicine when he comes to Duke this month.
"Our goal has always been to build the top sports medicine program at Duke," said Dr. Claude Moorman, director of sports medicine and associate professor of orthopaedic surgery. "The best use of Dr. Garrett's skills will be in educating residents and fellows and coordinating research initiatives."
Moorman added that when he was brought in as head of sports medicine two years ago, he met with Garrett and realized that the situation at UNC was not 'the greatest,' he said.
"We [had] discussed the possibility of him coming back then," he said.
Garrett, who served on Duke's faculty for 16 years after earning both his medical degree and doctorate in cell biology at Duke, was one of the top attendings when Moorman was a resident at Duke, Moorman said.
"I hope that by returning to Duke, I can help expand sports medicine clinical practice, as well as [bring] clinical and basic research to the forefront," Garrett said in a statement last week.
The other five former UNC faculty members--Dr. Scott Kelley, Dr. Joe Minchew, Dr. Louis Almekinders, Dr. Paul Tawney and Dr. David Thompson--have already set up an orthopaedic clinical practice, which opened July 15, and will operate at Durham Regional Hospital, one of the two community hospitals owned by Duke University Health System.
Moorman said DUHS supported the recruiting of the five physicians forming the practice to help fill a void in patient volume at Durham Regional. The additional volume at Durham Regional will both help the hospital financially and alleviate the three- to four-month waiting periods currently faced by patients seeking out treatment from the orthopaedics division.
"If they're full, that we can decompress it a little bit; hopefully, people referred to Duke won't have long waiting periods," Almekinders said.
He said one of the primary reasons he moved to Duke was the difficulty he faced as a state employee.
"There were lots of administrative hurdles anytime we'd try to accomplish something," he said. "It wasn't what we wanted to keep doing."
Almekinders added, however, that Duke did not 'recruit' the five physicians, nor did they approach Duke.
"One of the group serendipitously had a conversation with the Duke system and realized there was an opportunity at Duke," said Almekinders, who is also program chair for AOSSM.
Because the physicians' clientele is primarily from Chapel Hill, Almekinders said the current office on North Duke Street is only temporary, adding that within the next two years they would like to return to Chapel Hill.
Although the clinical practice will be the focus of the five orthopaedic surgeons, they will still continue their clinical research.
"All of us don't come into this as just having been academics.... We were all tenured professors with both national and international recognition, and that's not something we're going to give up," said Almekinders, who spent a year at Duke as a fellow. However, he plans to finish his research collaborations at UNC for the time being and will eventually begin research in Duke's orthopaedics division, which is ranked fourth in the nation, Moorman said.
The orthopaedics division is currently spread out between its clinic in Duke South, its sports medicine unit in the Finch Yeager Building and offices near The Streets at Southpoint and Durham Regional.
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