Q & A with Dr. Doug Miller and Dr. Arnett Mace

 

Dr. D. Douglas Miller, Dean, Medical College of Georgia School of Medicine

Dr. Arnett C. Mace, Jr., Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost, University of Georgia

What is involved in medical education?

Dr. Miller: Through undergraduate and graduate education, the nation’s medical schools and residency training programs prepare physicians to meet the health needs of the population. Medical education is a serious endeavor; thus it is both extraordinarily complex and highly regulated. To put it in perspective, students entering medical school at MCG in the fall of 2008 will not be fully engaged in the practice of primary care, for example, until as early as 2015. Medical education involves physician offices, hospitals, and interaction with patients in a wide variety of care settings -- in addition to traditional classroom and lab settings.

Why adapt a regional strategy?

Dr. Miller: The partnership strategy represents the best option to expand medical student education in Georgia to meet the pressing need for more physicians in our rapidly growing state.
This strategy is the most viable and affordable option to increase medical student education within a stipulated time frame.

Dr. Mace: I agree. At UGA, we have infrastructure – facilities, teaching expertise, research programs, and proximity to a robust medical community – that can expeditiously be leveraged to meet the needs of training medical students. Historically, the cost of a new medical school was approximately $500 million. Tripp Umbach tells us that this approach is the most cost effective alternative to boost medical education program in the nation.

What does the Tripp Umbach plan mean for MCG?

Dr. Miller: The strategies recommended by Tripp Umbach will enable us to increase MCG’s total medical school enrollment to 1,200 students by 2020. This includes a regional campus, expansion of our two clinical campuses and perhaps the addition of new ones. The net result is more physicians for Georgia because we have a strong track record of producing graduates who practice medicine in the state. Fifty four percent of our medical school graduates practice in the state; that compares with a national average of 39 percent of graduates who choose to practice in the state in which they graduate from medical school. But the bottom line is this initiative is not about individual institutions or individual communities. This is about educating more physicians to care for Georgians.

What does the proposed plan mean for UGA?

Dr. Mace: For starters, the plan expands medical education by placing MCG medical students on our Athens health sciences campus and we’re naturally very excited about that. An initial class of 40 students will matriculate no later than 2010 and expand to 60 students by 2017. That means the first doctors educated on the Athens campus will be practicing medicine as early as 2017. In addition, the plan provides an opportunity to transform an existing facility – the Navy Supply School – in a fantastic way, establishing a health sciences campus at UGA that would encompass the MCG School of Medicine Athens campus, the College of Public Health, health communications programs and a biomedical research laboratory. This extraordinarily low cost of acquiring this property provides an incredible advantage to the proposed new Athens campus – as our partnership with MCG will be able to offer competitive tuition and spend additional resources on top-rated faculty.

What are the benefits of collaboration between MCG and UGA?

Dr. Miller: Collaboration with UGA is attractive for many reasons. We are expanding to the maximum the number of medical students we can educate in Augusta and that’s not enough to meet the target of 1,200 total students by 2020. We need more physicians than we can educate in Augusta and have to develop partnerships to do just that. Athens and the Gainesville area also offer very robust medical communities. There are many physicians who are eager to participate in teaching medical students.

Dr. Mace: Both UGA and MCG have strong research missions, a history of excellence in education, wonderful facilities and very strong program basic science faculty. It’s a great fit. In addition, together MCG and UGA can attract more federal research grant money – enabling us to increase our efforts in this important area.

Have the two institutions worked together before?

Dr. Mace: Yes. One notable example is the partnership between UGA and MCG in training pharmacists. UGA’s College of Pharmacy offers the Doctor of Pharmacy professional degree. Together with MCG, we admit about 125 students a year. The four-year professional program integrates classroom, laboratory and experimental training in a curriculum organized around both human physiology and disease states.

Dr. Miller: In addition, we have an intercollegiate graduate assistantship status agreement with UGA graduate school, so that graduate students who are research assistants at either school can enroll and take courses in their degrees at either school at no further cost. Also, through the M.D.-Ph.D. program, students can take all their Ph.D. courses at any of the four research institutions. MCG’s School of Nursing in Athens also has some agreements with UGA, such as our students can use their library.

What will this partnership ultimately mean for the state of Georgia?

Dr. Miller: With the full implementation of this plan, MCG School of Medicine, through partnerships including the one with University of Georgia, would expand to 1,200 students.