The U School of Medicine currently ranks dead last in terms of amount of financial support per student from the state when compared with other public medical schools in the United States.
“We’ve been working with the [state] Legislature over the past year or two in an effort to make them understand that we’re very underfunded here,” said Dr. Lorris Betz, senior vice president for health sciences.
In order to maintain School of Medicine budgets, officials have had to cover education expenses with funds from clinical practice, which amounts to $16 million per year, Betz continued. That was the basis for the Health Science Center’s $15 million request from the Legislature.
The Legislature approved only $4.5 million for the medical school, $2.9 million of which came from a 30-cent per-carton tax increase on cigarettes. The other $1.6 million came from the general tax fund.
The medical school hopes to use that money as seed capital to generate matching funds of $10.5 million from Medicaid and other government programs, bringing the total to $15 million.
“These funds will be distributed to the departments in the medical school in relation to the amount of teaching they do,” Betz said.
This funding is only for the School of Medicine. The College of Nursing, College of Pharmacy and other health related programs are separate entities and are not included in this round of funding.
“We’ll be approaching the Legislature to fund them next year,” Betz said. “We’re seriously short of space and money to bring on and train more professors to meet our current needs.”
Utah, like most of the nation, suffers from a shortage of nurses.
“Only California and Nevada have a greater nurse shortage than we do,” said Sandy Taylor, College of Nursing spokeswoman. “We have no shortage of qualified applicants to the college, but we don’t have the facilities or professors to educate and train them all.”
In addition to the $4.5 million, the Legislature appropriated $33 million more for the School of Medicine so it can build a proposed Health Sciences Education Building.
“We asked for $37.5 million, but the Legislature only appropriated $33 million, so we’ll be working over the next year to raise $7 million from private sources so we’ll have $40 million available to work with,” Betz said.
Initial plans place the new health sciences building south of the Eccles Health Sciences Library, where a wooden barracks building now sits. It will be near the College of Nursing and the Bipolymers Building.
Health science officials are unsure how the building will look, though.
“We’re just now entering detailed program planning,” Betz said. “Then we’ll enter the design phase, and it will take possibly six months to get initial ideas as to what the building might look like.”