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Saturday, Dec. 06, 2008

Med school faces long odds

The road to campus is flanked by half-built suburban homes that would seem ideal for a faculty family or a young doctor putting down roots in Merced.

Just a minute up the road is the youngest campus of the University of California -- and the future headquarters of a potential medical school that could radically improve health care throughout the San Joaquin Valley.

But construction has stopped. Instead of young professional families lounging on their lawns, wood-framed skeletons and weedy vacant lots scar the landscape. Orange mercury-vapor lights cast shadows on empty dream homes.

Victims of the credit crunch and fiscal crisis, these residential shells symbolize the economic currents that have washed over Merced and most of the San Joaquin Valley. In their wake, worries have surfaced that the plan for the UC Merced School of Medicine, too, will face its own form of foreclosure as the state budget crisis worsens fast.

"We don't know the depth of the crisis yet. We don't know when it's going to turn around," said biochemist Maria Pallavicini, dean of the UC Merced School of Natural Sciences and a prominent champion of bringing a medical school here.

Looming UC budget cuts are planting seeds of doubt that a UC Merced School of Medicine -- initially set to enroll its first students in 2013 -- will open within the next decade.

In the best of times, launching a new medical school is a monumental task, requiring the mustering of huge amounts of money and political will. In the worst of times, it can seem nearly impossible.

Still, Valley residents -- whether bankers, politicians, farmers, business people or potential patients themselves -- cling to the dream. Every meaningful constituency in the Valley remains committed to making the med school a reality.

Some people are so confident it will happen, they're looking forward to being part of it. Tran Nguyen is 23 and in her last semester at Merced College. She will be transferring to UC Merced as a biology major in the Spring semester. When she finishes her undergraduate degree, she hopes the cards will fall so that she can be a part of the inaugural medical school class. She thinks a medical school will bring to the area doctors "who really, deeply care."

A new day in health care for the Valley

Whatever happens with UC Merced's med school, a new day in health care services may be on the horizon for the Valley. Take Merced, for example. In the northern part of the city, on G Street, two major medical buildings are going up right across the street from another -- a modern hospital and a new allied health education building at Merced College.

Those two buildings also rise from bare land as a symbol of hope. The new hospital will be up and running in the first half of 2010, and could draw potential medical school faculty members. The allied health building broke ground in 2007, funded by private donors and a generous bond measure passed by local voters.

Dr. Hanimireddy Lakireddy, a local cardiologist, contributed $1 million toward the building -- which carries his name -- and the college's health sciences program. "I was born in a poor, Third World country. Just because of education I became someone in this world," Lakireddy said in a recent interview about his donations. "Education is the easiest way to make someone, to make their life better."

Other changes in local health care are also in motion. In 2007, Southern California-based Loma Linda University moved services into the Valley, creating a rural health family-practice residency program in Hanford. UC Irvine School of Medicine is working with a Visalia hospital on a program that could bring even more residents to Tulare County.