West Tennessee Regional Forensic Center (WTRFC) is ramping up its staff following news last month that the
University of Tennessee Health Science Center (UTHSC) had been awarded a $3.1 million contract to operate the center and the Shelby County Medical Examiner's Office.
"The center is fully operational and has remained fully operational throughout the transition of the management to the university from Forensic Medical," says Dr. Ken Brown, UTHSC Executive Vice Chancellor and Chief Operations Officer.
UT had managed the facility for more than 20 years before the previous vendor, Forensic Medical, took over in 2006.
The new partnership with WTRFC, which will oversee medico-legal death investigation services for all 20 counties west of the Tennessee River that send autopsies to the facility, has resulted in job creation.
"Several new positions have already been created. We have hired two additional forensic pathologists, and we will hire an additional autopsy technician and an additional death investigator," says Brown. "We have also appointed an Admistrative Director of Operations--Professor and Chair of the UTHSC Department of Pathology Dr. Charles Handorf--for the facility."
The search to fill the technician and investigator positions will begin immediately.
Brown explains that the new positions will supplement the existing staff of three forensic pathologists that includes the Shelby County Medical Examiner, six autopsy technicians and six death investigators, an administrator and four administrative personnel. Ultimately the center will staff approximately 28 to 30 employees.
UTHSC will seek to run the forensic center beyond the first year of the new agreement.
"The reasoning for doing so is relatively straightforward, in that a lot of the programs and/or reasons for the university being interested in running the facility are long-term initiatives," Brown says. "The Forensic Pathology Fellowship, for example, is a fellowship that takes us about a year to get set up and then several years of training for the fellow to be prepared to sit for his boards to become a board-certified forensic pathologist. The GIS mapping of all the deaths in Shelby County is another thing we are interested in doing, so that we can study patterns of deaths over time."
By Michael Waddell
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