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Yes to med school
Governor signs bill to upgrade RAHC for doctor training
HARLINGEN — Fourth-year medical student Yvonne Umeh said she keeps looking for chances to come back to study at the Regional Academic Health Center.
Gov. Rick Perry and Sen. Eddie Lucio Jr., D-Brownsville, hope future medical students will follow in Umeh’s footsteps.
Umeh is a student at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio and spent her third year and part of her fourth year studying at the RAHC because she loves the Rio Grande Valley culture. Here, she can study diseases such as diabetes among a population with a high rate of the disease.
Perry and Lucio on Tuesday signed Senate Bill 98, which calls for the RAHC, which is overseen by UT Health Science Center in San Antonio, to be converted into an independent four-year medical school.
Chancellor of the University of Texas System Francisco Cigarroa, Rep. Eddie Lucio III, D-Brownsville, other state representatives and Mayor Chris Boswell also participated in the ceremonial signing held Tuesday at the RAHC.
The University of Texas Health Science Center-South Texas, Lucio said, would allow students from the Rio Grande Valley and surrounding counties to pursue a medical education.
“The time is here for (South Texas) students to have access to a medical education,” Lucio said.
Lucio said the signing of this bill “gets the ball rolling” on establishing a $100 to $150 million four-year university.
Lucio said he hopes to start working on ways to fund the project as soon as the next legislative session in 2011, which could have the medical school open in the next seven to eight years. He said he also hopes that the Texas Education Coordinating Board will continue its support for the school.
Perry said establishing a four-year university in South Texas will eventually lead to an increase in the number of physicians in an area that is underserved.
South Texas has 57 physicians for every 100,000 residents, Perry said. In other parts of the state, the average is 157 physicians per 100,000 residents.
“(Students) will be educated here and will stay here,” Perry said. “It is vitally important for this area, which has experienced a shortage of health caregivers for too long.”
“Less than 12 percent of medical school graduates are Hispanic,” Perry said. “We believe we can do better than that and this school will help with those (graduation rates).”
Lucio also said that a four-year medical school can have a local economic impact of about $1.3 billion in the school’s first 10 years.
