Here are the facts:

• After completing medical school, aspiring doctors must join a residency program to continue their training.

• Most new doctors wind up practicing medicine near where they underwent their residency.

• Florida ranks 42nd in number of medical residents per capita, and Florida’s population is expected to keep growing.

• Florida—and Sarasota in particular—needs doctors.

With those facts in mind, Sarasota Memorial Health Care System and Florida State University this week announced the creation of an internal medicine residency program here in town. If all goes according to plan, the area’s very first medical residents may begin their rotations here in 2017. Residents will be based at Sarasota Memorial Hospital. At full capacity, the program will produce up to 10 new internal medicine physicians a year.

And the hope, of course, is that many of those new doctors will stick around to practice in our community.

The next step in the plan will be to hire a program director and then begin establishing a curriculum, infrastructure and faculty—and acquiring the several million dollars that all requires—in order to gain approval of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME).

The announcement came as the Sarasota campus of the FSU College of Medicine celebrates its 10-year anniversary.