Dr. Teresa Bradley

New position: Vice president, medical affairs, St. Anthony's Health Care, St. Petersburg, Previous position: Executive director, Emergency Medical Associates of Florida, St. Petersburg

Dr. Teresa Bradley admits she will miss the daily hands-on aspect of practicing medicine. After being an emergency room physician for 28 years, she is taking on more administrative tasks as vice president of medical affairs at St. Anthony's Health Care.

She will be chief medical officer, working with her counterparts at other hospitals in the BayCare network to standardize medical policies and procedures. Bradley will be a liaison between the physicians and administration and the board of directors, she said.

"I represent the physicians' interests in every aspect of the hospital that relates to the ability of our physicians to take care of their patients," she said. That will involve "a lot of meetings, of course."

Bradley says the shift to an administrative role will be difficult. "I love practical medicine," she said. "I love patient interaction. I also have learned in the last several years that sometimes you can impact care for all patients more extensively in an administrative level than you can in one-on-one medicine."

She said she will continue to work "an occasional clinical shift" at the hospital's emergency room.

Since 1999, in addition to her emergency room duties, Bradley has been executive director of Emergency Medical Associates of Florida, a private corporation that provides physicians and nurse practitioners to emergency rooms at St. Anthony's and Bayfront Medical Center in St. Petersburg and St. Joseph's in Tampa. The job included overseeing the estimated 85 physicians who staff those BayCare emergency rooms.

That was where she began to see the impact administration can have on doctor-patient interaction, particularly in the realm of reams of paperwork. "Physicians these days are very, very busy," she said. "The requirements, as opposed to when I started 30 years ago, are unbelievable in terms of documentation. The paperwork is extensive, (and) they don't have a lot of time. So anything we can do to improve the efficiency of the hospital or to help them work more efficiently in their offices and have more time with patients and their own families" is important, she said.

Bradley said she most likes the diagnostic aspect of emergency room medicine, especially "having a patient come in without prior information, gathering information and then making a decision about what they need to have done and immediately being able to affect care for them.

"I like the challenge of being able to fix the problem immediately," she said.

Bradley entered medicine, she said, "because I was good in science and liked working with the public. I also enjoy a leadership role," she said. "I like being an individual who makes decisions."

That might explain the four years Bradley homesteaded along the Al-Can Highway in Alaska in the mid 1970s, building a cabin 150 miles north of Anchorage and starting a practice while also starting a family. She was the only physician for 350 miles along the Al-Can, the highway that connects the lower 48 states to Alaska, through Canada.

"I learned a lot about myself," she said. "You don't have a lot of other people to rely on. You have to become creative about solutions to problems. It was a great maturing experience," especially given that her cabin had no electricity and temperatures averaged between zero and 20 degrees in the winter.

Bradley grew up in Grantsville, W.Va., and earned a bachelor's degree in biology from West Virginia University, Morgantown, in 1966. She earned her medical degree at West Virginia University as well in 1970, and did her medical internship at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas.

Bradley moved with her family to Florida in 1981 to work at the Largo Medical Center. She joined St. Anthony's in 1992. Bradley is on the government affairs committee and the medical economics committee of the Florida College of Emergency Physicians and is a fellow the American College of Emergency Physicians.

Bradley, 59, lives in Seminole with her husband, Guy. They have five children and five grandchildren.

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