Austin medical school sidelined by recession, hurricane

Austin medical school sidelined by recession, hurricane

By Patrick Brendel Friday, 26 June 2009

The recession and Hurricane Ike forestalled efforts to bring a medical school to Austin during the Texas Legislative Session. Poor economic conditions made for a tight state budget with little room for major new projects such as a medical school, especially in light of the hundreds of millions of dollars needed to rebuild Galveston, its medical school and surrounding areas also hit by Ike.

Realizing the impracticality of making a medical school proposal at this time, state legislators did not file a single bill during the session related to an Austin medical school.

The State Legislature did, however, pass legislation committing to building a medical school in Harlingen. Currently, the only medical school on the Texas-Mexico border is the new Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in El Paso.

“That’s been determined to be a high-need area. There are those that essentially want to get it on record that, if there’s going to be a medical school, it needs to go in an area where we really need to bring in larger numbers of physicians,” said state Rep. Donna Howard, D-Austin. “But that doesn’t preclude having something happen in Austin as well.”

Even after 15 years of effort, Rio Grande Valley legislators were unable to procure funding for their future medical school. Instead, the bill allows University of Texas regents to take steps toward creating the medical school by the year 2015. The price tag on the Harlingen medical school—which will be an expansion of an existing health center where resident physicians can train for two years—is expected to be more than $100 million. (Lawmakers appropriated hundreds of millions of dollars toward rebuilding the hurricane-damaged University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.)

Though the legislative climate was unfavorable to an Austin medical school this session, Austin still possesses qualities that are conducive to establishing one in the future, including its central location, UT’s flagship campus, a prominent medical community and cooperative business leaders.

One encouraging sign is the announcement by UT that UT Southwestern Medical School in Dallas is going to take over the residency program at Seton Family of Hospitals. The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston currently trains residents, but UTMB has had to retract its operations since the destruction of its main facilities in the hurricane. The handoff to UT-Southwestern means an increase in Seton residents, rather than a decrease under UTMB.

“You cannot invest in building a medical school without a huge amount of capital that not only comes from the university system, but also comes from the community,” Howard said. “So that’s part of what’s going on right now, is building those relationships and making sure that significant capital will come from the community as well as from the university.”

Howard said the existence of the Texas A&M Health Science Center in Round Rock does not preclude the creation of a new medical school in Austin. A&M-Round Rock is geared toward training practitioners, while a potential Austin medical school would be research-based.

“They would actually be different types of medical schools,” she said.