One of the Oklahoma City Areas most attractive employment options is the Claremore Service Unit. Situated almost entirely in Oklahomas Green Country, the area is a lovely combination of fertile prairie land to the north and southwest and forest-covered Ozark foothills to the northeast. The Arkansas and Verdigris Rivers flow from northwest to southeast, their many man-made dams impounding 86,000 acres of deep lakes in the area. The natural beauty of the topography combines with a moderate climate to make the region a haven for lovers of the outdoors. The annual average temperature year-round is 60 degrees - on average only 82 degrees in July and 37 degrees in January. The unit encompasses 12 counties and 7,750 square miles. It serves an Indian population of some 63,000 mostly from the Cherokee and Creek tribes, although 15 more tribes are represented as well. Having integrated extensively with the non-Indian population in terms of education, employment, and language, the people served by this unit reflect patterns of illness that largely parallel those of the general Oklahoma population. Claremore, birthplace of Will Rogers and setting of the classic Broadway musical, Oklahoma!, is a town of 20,000 just 21 miles northeast of the very metropolitan city of Tulsa, with a U.S. Census county population of 571,348. Tulsa has a major airport with international flights and destinations in most major U.S. cities, and was ranked in the top 10 southern cities in Southern Living magazine and Fodors Travel Publications as one of its outstanding travel destinations. Tulsas cost of living is 8 percent BELOW the national average and has a County per capita income 11 percent ABOVE the national average. With its heritage captured in several museums and parks, Claremore is a nearly perfect place for families - small enough to allow plenty of time for growing up adjacent to a progressive center of culture, commerce, and higher education and close to an enviable array of healthy recreational outlets. The hospital at Claremore is a specialty based comprehensive care facility, providing care through nine organized clinical services: community health, dentistry, optometry, emergency medical services, general surgery, internal medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, pediatrics, and radiology. All these departments are headed by board-certified or board-eligible chiefs of service, four of whom hold adjacent appointments [as Associate Clinical Professors] with the University of Oklahoma Medical College and Oklahoma State University. The 50-bed facility has been JCAHO-accredited since 1978, just one year after its opening. Each year the thirty-six staff physicians and approximately 80 contract physicians admit about 1500 patients, deliver 400 babies, perform 1650 surgical procedures and attend nearly 155,000 outpatient visits. An equivalent number of outpatient visits are handled by other professional and paraprofessional hospital employees. The six-bed intensive and coronary care unit is fully equipped with sophisticated monitoring instruments. In addition, the facility has recently added state of the art CAT Scan equipment and trained staff to provide better and more timely clinical services. Following the general philosophy of the Indian Health Service, the hospital employs a team approach to disease prevention, management, and treatment. A salient example is the diabetes program which coordinates the expertise of a team of professionals, including a physician, a nurse practitioner, a nutritionist, a physical therapist, and a nurse educator - all concentrating their disciplines upon the growing problem of diabetes. The pharmacy has both anticoagulation and lipid clinics of national recognition. The pharmacy-based referral clinics manage most of the hospitals patients that require anticoagulation therapy or lipid management. This rapid-paced hospital maintains academic affiliations with six teaching institutions, hosting trainees in nursing, dentistry, physician assistance, family practice, and pharmacy. Medical students and resident physicians have the opportunity to perform clinical rotations on nearly every clinical service in the facility.