UH medical school receives accreditation

I've been following this saga for the past thirteen years (see here, here, here, and here), so I'm pleased to report that it has a happy ending:

The University of Houston has received the green light to move forward with its recruiting and enrolling its first class of 30 medical students for the first new medical school in Houston in over 50 years. 

The University of Houston College of Medicine has received its preliminary accreditation from the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, the authority on medical education in the United States and Canada that is sponsored by the American Medical Association and the American Association of Medical Colleges.

This accreditation means the school can begin enrolling its inaugural class of 30 students and begin classes on July 20. Each of these new students will receive a $100,000 four-year scholarship thanks to an anonymous donor.

To be sure, preliminary accreditation simply means that the new medical school is in a "probationary" period; the school now has to prove that it can meet the LCME's standards and, assuming it does so, will receive full accreditation in about four years.

Otherwise, the University of Houston College of Medicine is now officially a thing. I remember the days when the idea of UH having a medical school would have been considered a laughable fantasy, so this is a huge step forward for both the university and the region as a whole.

The school will focus its curriculum on primary care, behavioral and mental health, and preventive care, per the release, and create a household-centered care program that involves connecting a student with a family in an underserved community. According to the release, UH med students will be required to spend four weeks in a clinic in a rural part of the state. 

"At full staffing we will have 65 full-time faculty teaching on campus, but there will be also be a large number of community-based faculty teaching in the outpatient and inpatient clinical settings," says Dr. Stephen Spann, founding dean of the medical school, in the release. "It is imperative that we place our medical students and faculty directly in the communities with the most need."

The school will initially operate out of the Health 2 Building on campus, but will eventually move to an $80 million facility at the corner of Old Spanish Trail and Martin Luther King Jr Blvd. That facility will break ground this summer and is expected to be completed in 2022.