The School of Medicine will have to start preparing to support an additional 160 students. SB42, a bill that allocates $10 million from the Utah Education Fund to the medical school in order to allow the school to admit 40 more students per year, was passed by the House last week. A draft of the finished bill has been completed and will head to the governor for signing sometime in the next 60 days.
U President David Pershing said that the bill benefits more than just the U.
“I believe this is the right thing for the state of Utah,” Pershing said. “I think this is a state initiative.”
Although some of the allocated money will go toward paying the additional faculty that will be hired to teach the medical students, some of it will allow the school to construct new lab space. All of the other infrastructure is in place to support the additional 40 students because the school was supporting about 400 students before the Legislature cut funding a few years ago, limiting the school to 328 students, or 82 per class.
The cost is steep, but it will help the U provide the experiences and training that medical students need.
The bill stipulates that 82 percent of the students admitted to the U School of Medicine each year have graduated from a Utah high school or institution of higher learning.
Filling those spots will be short work for the medical school, which received 1,600 applications for its allotment of spots this year.
Rep. Michael Kennedy, R-Alpine, is co-sponsor of the bill and hopes that this requirement will help increase the number of primary care physicians in Utah where he is already expecting a shortage. He suggested that educating more medical students is the only way to provide enough good physicians.
“The University of Utah has been very proactive in accepting the fact that if we get our own native-grown, capable and intelligent students into that school, [they will be] vastly more likely to boomerang back to the state and come back to serve us,” Kennedy said.
Mark Brinton of the Utah Medial Association said the bill is significant because it will help educate more doctors in Utah.
“This is very important — we need more physicians in this state,” Brinton said.
Because of the large fiscal impact, the bill spent a lot of time zig-zagging across Capitol Hill, and although most were in support of adding students to the medical school, there was a lot of worry about the high cost of the bill.
Even Kennedy acknowledged that the bill would be hard to fund.
“We are not in easy financial times, and frankly with $10 million ongoing funding, I don’t think we’ll ever be able to easily swallow that bill,” he said. “However, I fully believe that this is vital for us.”
Despite worries about funding, the bill passed both houses with a clear margin. It passed unanimously out of the Senate and received just four nay votes in the House.