Hackensack UMC to launch med school. Hackensack University Medical Center and Seton Hall University are launching a medical school on the site of a shuttered pharmaceutical plant in northern New Jersey. The two institutions signed a memorandum of understanding that will be announced at a press conference Thursday morning. They hope to start accepting students in the fall of 2017, said HUMC Chief Executive Robert Garrett. The school will be built on a 110-acre facility in Nutley, N.J., about 15 miles from Hackensack’s main campus and six miles from Manhattan. The site is the former headquarters of Hoffmann La Roche, which relocated to Manhattan last January. About 14 acres of land and 500,000 square feet will be available for the medical school, said Mr. Garrett. He anticipates about 60% of the campus will be used for academics, with the rest devoted to consolidating research partnerships that HUMC has with nearby institutions. “Before Hoffman La Roche relocated their corporate headquarters, they put tens of millions of dollars into that campus,” Mr. Garrett said. “On the research side, we can pretty much move in as is.” Hackensack and Seton Hall will jointly fund the program, the only privately run medical school in the state. Seton Hall President A. Gabriel Esteban said he hopes the university’s relatively high proportion of first-generation and low-income students will also carry over into the medical school’s student body. Mr. Esteban added that he expects to receive philanthropic funding for the new venture, though neither he nor Mr. Garrett put a price estimate on the project. Training more students in-state could encourage an increasing number of new doctors to stay in New Jersey, said Mr. Garrett, especially in areas where there is a physician shortage, such as primary care, internal medicine and gynecology. But despite the increase in medical programs in recent years, the number of federally funded residency slots, a major determinant of physician supply, has not budged. While the Hackensack University Health Network has about 500 residency slots, enough to train many of the future school’s graduates, “we’ll continue to advocate for increased residency slots on the federal and state level,” Mr. Garrett said.
Posted on: Thu, 15 Jan 2015 11:29:52 +0000
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