The UF Health Cancer Center appointed a new deputy director of medical affairs Monday – Dr. C. Parker Gibbs.
Gibbs, who was chosen from a national search, will start Friday. Gibbs will head the clinical aspects of cancer care at UF Health Cancer Center at Shands.
“My goal is to bring compassionate, cutting-edge coordinated care to our patients,” Gibbs said.
He said his position was created to make navigation in the center for patients easier.
“If a patient is seen by a breast surgeon and has a surgery then needs radiation afterwards,” he said, “we coordinate that care so that the patient runs through that system in a seamless fashion and is not left to navigate that system on their own.”
Paul Okunieff, director of the center, said Gibbs easily outperformed other applicants and had the necessary leadership and experience for the job.
“It’s much more than experience,” Okunieff said. “It’s actually wanting to do good and actually putting his actions where his thoughts are.”
Gibbs is currently UF’s Eugene L. Jewett professor of orthopaedic surgery and serves as the College of Medicine’s division of musculoskeletal oncology chief. He also directs UF’s Musculoskeletal Oncology and Stem Cell Laboratory.
“I’m a cancer surgeon,” Gibbs said. “I think they were interested in bringing surgery into the cancer leadership realm.”
Gibbs graduated from UF with a medical degree in 1989 and completed his residency at the University of Colorado.
He served as the director of musculoskeletal oncology at the University of Colorado for five years before being appointed to the UF Department of Orthopaedics in 2003. Gibbs is also a National Institutes of Health/National Cancer Institute-funded investigator with nearly 60 published scientific papers.
Gibbs said one of the main things he wants to focus on at UF Health is cancer patient survival statistics and side effects.
“Cancer care is sometimes very toxic to the patient, and so we want to minimize side effects,” he said.
[A version of this story ran on page 5 on 10/7/2014]
