I'm Joe Austin, and I'm the executive vice president and chief operating officer for the Phoebe Health System. And let me talk to you about the residency program today we operate here. We are very fortunate. We have the Georgia, Southwest Georgia Pen Medicine Residency Program here. Currently, this year, we have 17 family practice residents in our program. But from a standpoint of why, why is a residency important to a community like this? And philosophically, I will tell you, if you look at a big picture, hospitals are known for multiple things around the country. Three things in my mind, hospitals really get to be known for. One is their clinical programming and their care. Two is the amount of research they do, and three is for education.

Now, as I look at Phoebe, we have all three of those things in place right now. We have phenomenal clinical program. We have a very, very good heart program. We have an outstanding oncology program. Our surgery program is next to none. So we're very strong on our clinical programming. We are the tertiary referral center for Southwest Georgia, something this community can be proud of.

So, we have that piece in place. Regarding the second thing, I believe, philosophically, that makes a hospital great is to do research. And we have a number of clinical trials in place right now, with numbers of our physicians working on clinical trials. So, from my standpoint, we're hitting the first two benchmarks. We're very strong clinically. We're doing a lot of research.

The third piece you'd want to be involved in, you want to be involved in education. Now, we're involved in education at numbers of levels. We are the number one training site for nurses doing clinical training in Southwest Georgia.

We have a University of Georgia Pharmacy residency program here, also. We have third and fourth year pharmacy students on our campus. Then, when we talk about the family medicine residency program, we have 17 students in this campus now. They each get their training, their medical training.

So, education keeps everyone on his toes, because our clinical training staff, our staff from the hospital, they have to be attuned to what they're doing in order to be a teacher. Now, you've got to smarter than a student if you're going to teach. So, our staff must stay on their toes.

The medical training staff were all volunteer physicians that are part of the Phoebe Health System that worked with the residents and their education. So, our physicians have always got to be the best and the highest trained, the best educated.

So, if you take all three of those, you add up our clinical programming, our involvement research, and the fact we have a residents program, this says an awful lot about the strength of the medical community down here.