UH picks associate deans for planned medical school
Three hires from Texas are next step for city’s first doctor training college in nearly 50 years
The University of Houston has hired three deans for its planned medical college, marking progress toward its goal of opening in 2020.
The new administrators are Dr. Ruth Bush, associate dean for medical education; Dr. Kathryn Horn, associate dean for student affairs, admissions and outreach; and Dr. David Buck, associate dean for community health. All come from Texas institutions.
“The success of a medical school starts with the quality of its leadership and we are thrilled to be assembling a dynamic team of proven leaders in medical education,” Dr. Stephen Spann, founding dean of the planned school, said in a statement. “They will all play a critical role in training a new breed of physicians that understand health disparities and social determinants of health.”
UH System regents in November voted to create the college, which must still be approved by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, the Texas Legislature and accredited by the Liaison Committee on Medical Education. Spann was named founding dean in February.
If it begins enrolling students in fall 2020, the college will be the first new medical school in Houston in nearly half a century.
The new deans represent the first major hires Spann has made for the medical college. Still remaining to be hired are chairs of biomedical sciences, clinical sciences, health system and population health sciences, and behavioral and social sciences.
Bush most recently served as a professor at Baylor College of Medicine and deputy director of the Center for Innovations in Quality, Effectiveness and Safety at the Michael E. DeBakey Veterans Affairs Medical Center. A graduate of the University of North Carolina School of
Medicine, she previously taught at the Texas A&M College of Medicine and was chief vascular surgeon at the Olin E. Teague VA Medical Center in Temple. She is also an attorney.
Horn has spent nearly three decades in various leadership and faculty roles at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center El Paso, including assistant vice president for student services, associate dean for student affairs and professor of family and community medicine. A graduate of Baylor, she was also medical director of Circle of Hope Hospice of Visiting Nursing Association in El Paso.
Buck served as a professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine for more than two decades at Baylor. A Baylor graduate, he also founded Healthcare for the Homeless-Houston and Patient Care Intervention Center to improve health care quality and costs for underserved populations.
UH’s plan calls for the college’s focus to be preparing primary-care doctors who practice in underserved urban and rural areas. Texas ranks 47th out of 50 states in the ratio of primary care doctors per person, and the shortage is expected to get worse. Despite recent pushes to increase the pipeline of doctors in the state’s rural and urban areas, a significant number of counties and communities, many in the Houston area, continue to be classified as medically underserved.
UH submitted its proposal for the school to the Coordinating Board in March and hopes to receive its approval by the end of the year. It plans to submit an application for accreditation to the Liaison Committee on Medical Education by December 2018 for preliminary accreditation by October 2019.
The price tag for the college is expected to exceed $272 million over 13 years. UH plans to ask the Texas Legislature for $40 million over 10 years to cover some of the costs.