Temple’s four–year medical school is now a fact, and the money to fund it became a reality when the governor signed the state’s budget on Friday.
Temple has had a longtime affiliation with the A&M medical school, with third– and fourth–year medical students receiving their clinical training in Temple. This latest phase in the development of the Temple campus comes after years of planning and coordination.
This summer, 20 first–year students will be admitted to the Temple medical school, a benchmark in the 30–year tenure of the A&M College of Medicine in College Station.
“On so many levels the addition of a complete school of higher education enhances the whole community,” said Dr. Alfred Knight, president and CEO of Scott and White Hospital and Clinic. “On the economic level, there is the addition of students, the faculty hired to support those students and the research that comes with those faculty. It’s a cascade of wonderful academic and economic benefits to the entire area.”
Medical schools are often one of the major stimulants for additional medical related industries coming to town and that fits in with the local bioscience initiatives, Knight said.
All medical school faculty, in one way or the other, are involved in research and the research enterprise creates value for the area, said Dr. Donald Wesson, vice dean of the Texas A&M Health Science Center Temple Campus. There’s the benefit of new knowledge, new jobs and a creation of intellectual capital.
“An academic medical center that has a strong research component has a great intellectual and economic benefit to a community,” Wesson said.
The funds allocated for the Temple campus will go a long way in bringing notice to the city and the medical school.
“This is not just a home run, it’s a home run with the bases loaded,” said Rep. Dianne White Delisi, R–Temple, of Temple’s four–year medical school.
Temple is something of an anomaly, she said. It’s not a major metropolitan area, but its infrastructure for health care is significant, with Scott and White, the medical school, the VA, King’s Daughters Hospital and the Carl R. Darnall Army Medical Center on Fort Hood.
The health care infrastructure of the area is influential and that influence is bound to grow, Rep. Delisi said.
Two more years
The addition of two more years at the medical school will be a tremendous gain for Temple for many reasons, said Lee Peterson, president of the Temple Economic Development Corporation.
The addition of professors, researchers and students will complement the city’s health and bioscience initiatives which include Scott and White’s Cancer Research Institute, the Cardiovascular Research Institute and the Bioscience District and will go a long way in helping grow Temple’s bioscience district cluster, he said.
“It’s a natural fit,” Peterson said.
The addition of professors, staff and students to the population, as a result of the expansion, will definitely grow our economy, he said.
As for what the expansion of the medical school means to Temple and the region, David Blackburn, Temple city manager, said he thinks it may be one of the single most significant events to have occurred in the city’s rich history.
Class size at the Temple campus will grow as state appropriations permit, but will eventually exceed 100, Wesson said.
The A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine is a single medical school with one curriculum and two campuses - one in College Station, one located in Temple.
Testing and expectations will be exactly the same at both campuses, Knight said.
“Naturally there is a personality of any community,” Knight said. “The Temple community, from a medical viewpoint, is aiming toward nationally ranked academic status which involves specialty, subspecialty care and higher levels of research. Those kinds of initiatives would be more prominent in Temple.”
In College Station, where there is access to A&M University and university researchers, there would be a different focus, he said.
In the clinical setting, College Station offers strong community hospitals as opposed to the more tertiary and quaternary (specialized) care at Scott and White, Knight said.
“Creating a new medical school happens infrequently,” Wesson said. “Being able to expand a medical school from its humble origins to something that many of us have imagined is a very exciting place to be.”
At this point in the development of two new four–year campuses there is an opportunity to re–examine curriculum and put into place some of the tremendous innovations research have shown to be beneficial, he said.
“There are opportunities to improve the training of our medical school students, residents and fellows,” he said.
Innovative training
Texas A&M, Wesson said, has been a leader in the innovative ways it trains students to become better practicing physicians.
One of the challenges in traditional medical education is the hard–line division between classroom and in–clinic education, he said. The teaching of the two have been done in isolation, making it difficult for students to apply what is learned in the classroom to the management of patients seen in the hospital.
“The creation of two medical school campuses, almost from scratch, gives us an opportunity to revise the curriculum and to blend classroom and in–clinic instruction,” Wesson said.
A&M is a pioneer in the use of simulation - mechanized mannequins and technology - to train students, he said.
Most students are taught using live patients, but there are limitations, Wesson said.
“We are revising the curriculum to make the simulation training more prominent,” he said. “Research has shown it’s more beneficial to patients and the students actually learn better.
“The simulation center at Temple College is the best of its kind in the nation,” Wesson said. “Here we are one of the youngest medical schools in the nation but we’re leading more established medical schools in how to better train medical students.”
Wesson said he was excited to be part of the growth of A&M and thrilled with partnership of A&M and Scott and White.
“While it’s not completely unique, it’s very distinctive,” he said. “This public/private partnership will be a model other medical centers will follow because we can show how successful we are in taking care of all three parts of what an academic medical center does - teach, take care of patients with high quality care and do research.”
VA partnership
Bruce Gordon, director of the Central Texas Veterans Health Care System which includes the Temple VA, said the VA and medical school have good a partnership that enables students to be exposed to patients and medical issues not seen in equal numbers in other venues - orthopedics, geriatrics and mental health.
Also, by having a culture of academics at the Temple VA, Gordon said he could more easily recruit the highest quality providers who are interested in working at medical centers with teaching and research missions.
“The mayor, city council members, business leaders, business organizations, and many individuals, were all involved at various levels to help make the expansion of the medical school a reality,” Blackburn said.
The Economic Development Corporation, Chamber of Commerce, local builders association and several other groups provided a unified voice to the Legislature, Blackburn said.
“The impact of this effort was significant and can not be overstated,” he said.
The physical location of the medical school building has not been decided.
“We will be working with the college of medicine and the bioscience district to assess the appropriate place for that building,” Knight said.
The medical school, he said, would like to put the buildings where there will be students, researchers and clinicians coming in and out of it every day,
“Logically they would probably like the building closer to the main clinical facility on the Scott and White campus, but there are benefits to putting it on the West Campus where the focus is more on pure research,” Knight said.
Economic impact
The Perryman Group in 2005 put together an economic impact study for the Bioscience Economic Development District on the potential impact of a bioscience district facility on business in Temple and Texas.
While the study did not take into consideration a four–year medical school, the concept included the development of bioscience research facilities and an acute care hospital, which along with the medical school makes up the bioscience and healthcare initiatives Temple is pursuing.
According to the study, the development of the bioscience facilities would result in the employment of an additional 811 people over an 11–year period.
If the research facility operations resulted in the location of one sizable biotechnology firm the business activity is estimated to be $1.5 million in annual total expenditures, $705 million in annual gross state product, $394 million in annual personal income, $154 million in annual retail sales and 7,568 permanent jobs.
jgibbs@temple-telegram.com
