Faith in medical school, its students is rewarding for Southern Nevada
It will be a proud moment for Las Vegas when members of the UNLV Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine’s first class get their diplomas in May. However, the Class of 2021 has already given us reason to cheer. It happened last month, when it was revealed that more than a third of the 50 soon-to-be-graduates — 18 in all — would remain in Nevada for their residencies. That was big for our community both short- and long-term, and it’s a shining example of why establishing our own medical school was a significant benefit for Southern Nevada.
In the near term, we’re getting an infusion of talented young professionals into our health care system, which has struggled to adequately serve the community amid a persistent shortage of health care providers and the rapid growth of the region. Meanwhile, the Association of American Medical Colleges reports that 68% of doctors who complete their training in one state end up practicing there, meaning there’s a good chance that several members of the graduating class — and those who follow — will stay put and provide high-quality health care to Las Vegans for decades to come.
“It is truly historic, both for the school and city of Las Vegas,” said Dr. Neil Haycocks, vice dean for academic affairs and education, on the day the residencies were announced. He was right.
This is one of the outcomes that UNLV leaders and supporters envisioned when they founded the school in 2014.
Until then, Las Vegas was the largest metro in the U.S. without an M.d.-granting medical school of its own. Although the UNR School of Medicine had a presence here at the time, most of that school’s focus was on Reno, and its impact on our health care needs was negligible.
Establishing a medical school is no easy task, though, and it was made more difficult due to meddling and mismanagement by the overseers of the state’s higher education system. Their poor leadership held back progress, as shown perhaps most vividly by the fact that three different proposals for a new instructional building for the school came and went before local supporters washed their hands of the system’s leaders and formed a nonprofit development corporation that will construct a building and lease it to UNLV for $1 a year.
In enrolling at UNLV in 2017, the students in that first class took a risk. The school had yet to receive accreditation, a complex process that generally takes eight years to complete and can be filled with setbacks. Therefore, those students faced the possibility that UNLV would fail to achieve accreditation by the time they graduated — if at all — and they would either be forced to go elsewhere and retake courses or receive a devalued degree. Meanwhile, the dysfunction among leaders of the state’s higher ed system only added uncertainty to the school’s future.
However, the UNLV community stepped up by providing full scholarship funding for every member of the first class. It was a show of confidence not only in those students but in the school, and today that selfless investment is paying off for the entire community.
In February, the students were rewarded for their faith in UNLV when the school received full accreditation after five years of being partially accredited.
Now, those students are preparing to fan out in Nevada and across 17 other states, where they’ll join residency programs at such highly respected institutions as Johns
Hopkins University, Yale, USC and UCLA.
It’s the start of something very good for Nevada, and especially the Las Vegas Valley. With work progressing smoothly on the new building — a five-story, 128,000-squarefoot structure scheduled for completion in summer 2022 — UNLV will soon be able to increase its class size to 120. That expanded capacity will send even more graduates into local residencies and into long-term practice in the community.
The fully functional med school will help Las Vegas indirectly as well, as these schools attract new health care providers, researchers and associated companies to communities. Analysts have predicted the economic impact of the UNLV school at $1.2 billion once it’s fully built out, and say it will create 8,000 new jobs in the valley.
Last week’s renaming of the school for Kerkorian, the iconic Las Vegas visionary and philanthropist, was another bit of welcomed news. Kerkorian is the ideal honoree for the school, as he played a leading role in transforming Las Vegas from a town of less than 100,000 in 1960 to the metro of 2.2 million it has become. The medical school is an example of today’s leaders carrying on his spirit and foresight: It’s already moving Las Vegas forward, and will continue to do so for years to come.