PARKERSBURG - A group of local business people learned Monday the medical education and hospital programs at West Virginia University are doing fine, although there are concerns about the future.
Dr. James Brick, interim dean of the West Virginia University School of Medicine, was the speaker at Monday's weekly Parkersburg Rotary luncheon at the Blennerhassett Hotel.
Brick said the history of the WVU medical school goes back to 1948 when gubernatorial candidate Okey L. Patteson promised to build a four-year medical college in West Virginia and was elected. However, Patteson didn't get a second term because of political fallout from his decision to build it in Morgantown when many other areas of the state strongly wanted the facility, he said.
The original medical school, which still stands at the center of a much larger health complex at WVU, was built using funds from a 1 cent tax on all soda sold in West Virginia, Brick said. That tax remains in place and is still an important fundamental funding source for the medical school, he said.
There has been much additional construction since that time, including the addition of the college's hospital and other facilities, but none of those have involved state funding, Brick said. The college has funded those additions itself through fundraising or loans.
Over the past three years, Brick said applicant enrollment has continued to climb for the medical education programs at WVU, from 1,444 in 2006 to 1,522 in 2007 to 1,541 this year. While slight, Brick said that increase is better than the national average, which has remained more static in the past few years.
"The students come from all over West Virginia. The majority of the students at the Health Sciences Center are West Virginia kids," he said.
There are a number of challenges faced by the WVU Medical program, Brick said. Those include flat state funding, the pop tax, rising tuition and fees, an aging faculty and faculty recruiting problems and reductions in funding for educational institutions.
"We're strong, the school is healthy, but we're having increasing financial stress," Brick said. "We're to the point where it's getting increasingly more difficult as faculty to be able to increase the amount of clinical dollars we can raise to support the school," he said, adding more than 50 percent of the school's funding comes from the clinical practice of medicine, meaning the hospital and doctors' services.
At the university president's request, administrators and officials throughout WVU's Health Science Center and hospital programs are working together on plans to analyze and realign all of the related programs to be more efficient and cost effective. A plan should be prepared for review after the first of the year, he said.
"This is going on all over the country," he said. "Places like this are under financial stress and university hospitals and their associated medical schools are looking at their relationship and trying to find more value in their relationship and how they do business so there will be more money to use for the kinds of things we need money for," Brick said.
