Three UF College of Medicine-Jacksonville physicians were finalists – and one of them a winner – in the Jacksonville Business Journal’s 2006 Health Care Heroes awards program.
In its third year, the program honors the professionals in Northeast Florida who improve health care and save lives – “the crusaders, lifesavers and ordinary people doing extraordinary work,” according to the weekly journal.
Since the program’s inception in 2004, finalists have been selected from five categories: Lifetime Achievement, Super Physician, Super Scientist, Community Service and Super Nurse. This year a sixth category, Super Educator, was added. All 16 of this year’s finalists were honored at a breakfast Nov. 2 at the Marriott-Southpoint.
Shahla Masood, M.D., a professor and associate chair of UF’s department of pathology in Jacksonville, was named the program’s first Super Educator for her “worldwide efforts to educate fellow physicians and patients about advances in breast cancer diagnosis and treatment.”
Masood is founder and editor of The Breast Journal and founding president of The International Society of Breast Pathology. She also is a 2006 recipient of the Parker J. Palmer “Courage to Teach” award, given by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education for advances in the field of pathology education and for her efforts to advocate quality health care for all people.
For 24 years Joseph Tepas III, M.D., a UF professor of surgery and pediatrics, has had two research passions – defining and improving care of injured children and investigating neonatal gastrointestinal physiology, especially the phenomenon of adaptive hypertrophy, a thickening of organ walls. Tepas was named a finalist in the Super Scientist category “for being a friend to sick and injured children and conducting tireless research on their behalf.”
Tepas helped establish a national trauma databank that tracks information about children’s injuries and their outcomes, allowing users to conduct population-based studies on certain types of injuries. He also received a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant to study high-risk ZIP codes to see what types of interventions might be useful in preventing death and injury from traumas.
A nationally recognized congenital heart disease expert, Jose Ettedgui, M.D., a UF professor and division chief of pediatric cardiology, was named a finalist in the Community Service category. He and his wife, Hilda, are the driving forces behind the Patrons of the Hearts Foundation-a partnership of the College of Medicine-Jacksonville, Wolfson Children’s Hospital and the arts community that brings critically ill children to Jacksonville for lifesaving treatment.
In April the foundation brought the first six children to Jacksonville from Morocco, Afghanistan, Africa, Grenada and Ecuador for successful surgeries. Each operation costs about $40,000 and requires four to five weeks for evaluation, pre-surgery preparation, surgery and recovery. Medical community partners provide donations of medical, surgical and hospital care, and Patrons of the Hearts pays for the family’s living expenses and disposable medical supplies.