June 9, 2009


Jamie Francis graduated from Cape Hatteras Secondary School in 1997 as valedictorian of her class.

She left the island to attend the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has been gone ever since.  After she earned her bachelor’s degree, she went on to UNC School of Medicine.  She graduated from medical school in 2004 and is now winding up a four-year residency in Delaware.

Along the way, she married another islander and Cape Hatteras graduate, Heath Fountain.

This summer she will return to the island after 12 years away as Dr. Jamie Francis Fountain.  At age 29, she will begin her new career at HealthEast Family Care on Aug. 17.

Jamie Fountain is the daughter of Bill Francis, who works in maintenance at the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum, and Darlene Francis, who teaches technology at Cape Hatteras Secondary School of Coastal Studies. She has two sisters, Suzanne Francis, who works at RBC Bank in Buxton, and Amy Francis Bush, who is a dental assistant at the UNC School of Dentistry in Chapel Hill.

Her husband, Heath, is the son of Earl Fountain and Renne Barnett.

Heath, 31, graduated from Cape Hatteras Secondary School in 1995 – two years ahead of Jamie.  The two knew each other but did not begin dating until Heath moved to Chapel Hill to work and reconnected with Jamie when she was a student there.

Jamie Fountain says she’s always wanted to be a physician and always wanted to return to Hatteras.

“About third grade,” she says, “my mom planted the idea (of being a doctor) in my head, and it stuck.”

“And,” she adds, “I always intended to come back here.”

She says she went to medical school to be a pediatrician.

“I really like children,” she says, “and that was an early commitment of mine.”

However, along the way Fountain says she was challenged by “seeing the sicker patients, the more interesting and complex cases.”

After her graduation from med school, Jamie found a way to combine both interests by doing a four-year residency in internal medicine and pediatrics at Christiana Care, a private, not-for-profit regional health care system based in Wilmington, Del.

Fountain says a residency in either specialty is usually three years, but the program at Christiana combines the two specialties and compacts them into one very busy four-year residency.

Residents these days, she says, are limited to an 80-hour work week. On some rotations, such as intensive care and in-patient intake, she says it was hard to keep it down to 80 hours.  Some others, such as out-patient care, could be managed in 40 or 50 hours.

As a resident, she also saw patients – adults and children – a half-day each week in a clinic run by the residents. Also, she was selected as chief resident for this, her final year.  She directed 18 other residents, performing chores such as setting schedules and facilitating communications with physicians in both internal medicine and pediatrics.

As she approached her last year of residency last summer, Fountain says it occurred to her that she best start looking for a job.

As it happens, HeathEast Family Care, which operates two medical centers on Hatteras Island, has had a vacancy since Dr. Seaborn Blair left two years ago to practice on Topsail Island.

She talked with officials at University Health Systems in Greenville, which owns HealthEast last summer, and spent a week in October at HealthEast on the island, seeing patients with the other two physicians, Al Hodges, Jr., and T. Bentley Crabtree, Jr.

Fountain says she saw Hodges as a patient several times while she was in high school, once for a sprained ankle.

However, she said, it did not seem strange to return to work with him during her week here.

“I was more worried about the patients and how they would see me,” she says.

During her week she saw former teachers, who remembered her from high school, and their children.  And that didn’t seem strange either.

“After we got past the greetings….it was just a normal doctor-patient relationship.”

Fountain is interested to learn of Dare County’s Childhood Obesity Project.

“That is a growing problem coming to the forefront now,” she says, noting that the children’s hospital in which she worked in Delaware has a weight-management program for children.

Another of her interests is in caring for children with chronic medical conditions, such as asthma, cerebral palsy, cardiac problems, and childhood cancer, and helping them and their physicians make a transition from pediatric to adult care.

“Twenty years ago, many didn’t survive into adulthood,” she says.

But now many are and the physicians who see adult patients “don‘t know what to do with them.”

Last week, Jamie and Heath Fountain were on Hatteras to move into their new house in Hatteras Pines with their two cats, Wookie and Zoey.  They don’t close on the house until later this month, but worked out a deal with the owners to let them move in before the closing.  Their house in Newark, Del., sold in just 10 days and they had to be out of it – not a problem that many sellers have these days.

Heath was a salesman at a Saturn dealership in Delaware, and is looking at a real estate career on Hatteras.  He is beginning some classes this summer.

After unpacking boxes and starting to get settled, Jamie Fountain headed back to Delaware to finish the last three weeks of her residency.

She’s already had her graduation for her internal medicine residency and will have another ceremony for her pediatric residency on June 19.  On June 20, the residents who combined the two specialties will have a gathering.

“I will be sad leaving Christiana,” Fountain said, “but it’s not home.”

After the ceremonies, she will return to Hatteras to study for her board certification exams – Aug. 11 for internal medicine and Oct. 12 for pediatrics.

And on Aug. 17, she will begin seeing patients at both the Avon and Hatteras medical centers.

“It’s nice to be back in a small community,” she says. “You see people you know when you go out.  In Delaware, we were more anonymous.”

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