UA College of Medicine Opens in Downtown Phoenix Tuesday

UA College of Medicine Opens in Downtown Phoenix Tuesday

By University Communications
October 05, 2006

Following a historic statewide collaborative effort, The University of Arizona College of Medicine - Phoenix, in collaboration with Arizona State University, will open its new facility at the Phoenix Biomedical Campus on Tuesday.

The historic Phoenix Union High School buildings (circa 1910) underwent an "adaptive reuse" renovation that transformed the vacant campus into a state-of-the-art medical education facility. The invitation-only event will feature brief remarks by Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano and Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon, among several other dignitaries.

Among the nation’s fastest-growing states, Arizona desperately needs more physicians, especially in rural communities. Arizona is currently ranked 45th in the nation for physicians per capita and Phoenix is the largest city in the country without an allopathic medical school. Expansion of the college in downtown Phoenix, in collaboration with ASU, represents a major inroad in addressing this health care crisis. When fully developed, the new medical school is expected to graduate as many as 150 new physicians each year; the Tucson campus graduates 110 medical students each year.

Since 1992, the college has operated a regional campus in Phoenix, allowing about 40 percent of third- and fourth-year medical students to complete their studies in Maricopa County. In August 2004, the Arizona Board of Regents approved an agreement to expand the operations of the college in Phoenix, in collaboration with ASU, to a four-year program.

The city of Phoenix provided land to establish the Phoenix Biomedical Campus, which, in addition to the UA College of Medicine, is the site of the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), the future site of the Arizona Biomedical Collaborative (under construction), and the ASU department of biomedical informatics, as well as planned expansion of the nationally ranked UA College of Pharmacy, among other programs and facilities.

The UA College of Medicine, which opened its doors in 1967, is ranked among the nation’s top 60 medical schools by U.S. News & World Report. Total research funding has grown from $345,000 in 1967 to $125 million in 2004. Although the College of Medicine in Tucson is small by national standards (a primary reason for the expansion), it is ranked third among U.S. medical schools with a faculty of 600 or less, and 55th overall in funding from the National Institutes of Health, a common measure of research performance.

An expanded College of Medicine will provide tremendous economic benefits for Arizona. A study by Tripp Umbach Healthcare Consulting Inc. indicates that statewide academic medical activities, driven by the College of Medicine as the state’s sole allopathic medical school, generates an estimated $2.5 billion in annual economic activity. The Phoenix Biomedical Campus could rank among Arizona’s leading economic engines by 2025, generating (by conservative estimates) as much as $2.1 billion annually and providing stable employment for up to 24,000 Arizonans, according to Tripp Umbach. The college also will benefit from the economic and scientific synergy due to its close proximity to internationally recognized TGen, ASU’s Downtown and Tempe campuses and ASU’s fast-emerging biomedical research program, as well as the many excellent Phoenix-area teaching hospitals and research institutes.

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