California Healthline
\nAnna Gorman<\/p>\n
The Claremont Colleges plans to open a medical school, the fourth new campus designed to produce physicians for parts of Southern California struggling with shortages.<\/p>\n
The Keck Graduate Institute School of Medicine will focus on primary care and treating the growing Latino population in California, institute officials announced this week. The school hopes to hire its founding dean by next summer, and open a few years after that.<\/p>\n
Administrators hope many of the graduates will stay to practice medicine in eastern Los Angeles County or the Inland Empire, an ethnically diverse region that encompasses Riverside and San Bernardino counties and is home to about 4 million people.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur goal is to recruit them from here, train them here and keep them here,\u201d said Sheldon Schuster, president of the Keck Graduate Institute<\/a>. The institute is part of the Claremont Colleges<\/a>, a consortium of five undergraduate and two graduate institutions about 35 miles east of Los Angeles. The institute already has a pharmacy school.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is such an incredible demand for people who \u2026 understand the community and who speak the language,\u201d Schuster said.<\/p>\n The campus joins a wave of new medical schools across the nation that began opening in the early 2000s. \u201cThere has been a huge increase in the last 15 years,\u201d said Atul Grover, executive vice president of the Association of American Medical Colleges<\/a>.<\/p>\n Historically, however, California had not been part of that wave. Now, he said, \u201cthe state has been trying to play catch-up.\u201d<\/p>\n The California University of Science and Medicine<\/a>, funded by the Prime Healthcare Foundation<\/a>, is debuting this summer in Colton, in San Bernardino County, with a class of 60. The University of California-Riverside<\/a> School of Medicine, which opened in 2013, recently graduated its second class, made up of 49 medical students.<\/p>\n Kaiser Permanente\u2019s medical school<\/a> in Pasadena is under construction and expected to welcome its first class next year<\/a>. (Kaiser Health News, which produces California Healthline, is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.)<\/p>\n The new schools in California and around the nation not only can expand the workforce, but also increase its diversity, said Holly Humphrey, president of the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation<\/a>, which focuses on medical education.<\/p>\n Only about 5 percent of physicians in California are Latino<\/a>, though Latinos make up about 38 percent of the population, according to a recent report<\/a> by University of California researchers and funded by the California Health Care Foundation. (California Healthline is an editorially independent publication of the California Health Care Foundation.)<\/p>\n The new medical schools, though smaller than established Southern California institutions such as Loma Linda University School of Medicine<\/a> and Keck School of Medicine of USC<\/a>, could help change that and expand the limited supply of doctors in the Inland Empire. The ratio of both primary care doctors and specialists per 100,000 residents in the area is roughly half that in the greater Bay Area, according to the University of California-San Francisco Healthforce Center.<\/a><\/p>\n San Bernardino and Riverside counties also have a higher proportion of Latinos than the state as a whole, according to the U.S. Census.<\/p>\n Douglas Grover, 32, grew up in Moreno Valley and graduated from UC-Riverside\u2019s first medical school class last year. He stayed on at the university for his residency in psychiatry, a specialty whose rates in the Inland Empire are far below those statewide.<\/p>\n Grover said he wants to practice in the area so he can give back to his community.<\/p>\n \u201cIf we open more opportunities here for college students to enter medical school, it will provide more physicians over the long run and hopefully help with the disparities in these areas,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n