FCEP NEWS

November 18, 2008

Remembering Bill Haeck 

By J. Clifford Findeiss, MD
FCEP Past President, 1975-76

Bill Haeck, founder of the Florida College of Emergency Physicians, passed away this past weekend. On behalf of his family and friends, I would like to invite you to join us, this coming Saturday, when we honor Bill in a celebration of his life.

I would like to take a moment to reflect with you on the life of my friend and mentor Bill Haeck. Bill was a man of unswerving integrity, undaunted commitment, and undying idealism in pursuit of better emergency care for victims of acute illness. He was a fine man with a big heart.

Bill was the founder of our "colony" of emergency care professionals in Florida. Bill was the chief architect and engineer of Florida emergency medicine. Why is this true?

Bill was a true visionary! But he was far more than a visionary. In the late1960s, Bill was one of the first to recognize the need for better care for acutely ill and injured people, throughout the spectrum of intervention. Bill not only had a vision, he worked tirelessly to change the way care was delivered both, in the pre-hospital and hospital settings, before most others embraced the vision.

He started one of the first emergency physician groups in Florida, at Memorial Hospital in Jacksonville. He was one of the founders of ACEP. He single-handedly founded the Florida Chapter. He wrote our by-laws. He drove from hospital to hospital in his pink Buick Century to recruit maverick doctors working in ERs to join the new organization. These physicians were not our residency-trained, board certified professionals of today, but rather a motley crew, with diverse backgrounds.

As a President of ACEP in the early 70s, Bill envisioned and appointed ACEP’s first committee to explore and to create a board exam for emergency physicians. This led rapidly to the creation of ABEM. An explosion of residency training programs for emergency physicians followed. Within a few years medical staffs and hospital administrators began to change their previously dim view of us as "motley," and we became respectable colleagues. Our field blossomed with professionalism as board certified specialists joined our ranks. These events were the fruit of the seeds Bill sowed and a result of his tenacity.

Bill not only championed ACEP in the early 70s, but he wrote EMS legislation. He lobbied the Florida legislature to create a new category of professionals we now know as EMTs. His argument for requiring training for EMTs was a creative juxtaposition of mortuary hearse drivers to licensed barbers. While barbers were required to complete specific training to obtain a license to cut hair, no professional training was required for ambulance attendants. Since mortuary drivers with no emergency care training often doubled as ambulance attendants, they sometimes had a conflict of interest upon arrival at a crash scene, and sometimes scooped up the dead for transport in preference to the critically injured. Bill was passionately committed to reforming this archaic practice. I marveled at Bill’s zeal to achieve change. And Bill became my role model.
We, as emergency physicians, as well as countless beneficiaries of Florida’s extraordinary EMS system, owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Bill Haeck for his insight and leadership. We are all a part of Bill’s legacy. We are the legacy of his vision and his lifetime of accomplishments.

Bill, we respect you, and we appreciate all that you gave to our world.

Thank you; we love you and we will miss you!

Janie, Bill’s wife, and his family have made arrangements for Bill’s Memorial, which will be a “Celebration of Life” at the Boca Country Club at 3:00 pm on Saturday, November 22nd, in Boca Raton. Please take a moment to reflect on the innumerable contributions Bill made to, and for, so many lives, over so many years.

Bill has requested, and his family would appreciate, any contribution you would like to make in his memory to the Emergency Medicine Learning and Resource Center.

If possible, I hope to see you at Bill’s memorial.

Respectfully,

Cliff Findeiss