University of Utah heralds opening of Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine

University of Utah’s medical students of the future will spend more time with hands-on learning that starts earlier and is more immersive than what any of the school’s previous medical students experienced. Or, for that matter, most students at any U.S. medical school.

That future starts now, with the official opening of the Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine on the university’s upper campus, which is largely focused on health education and care. The school’s ribbon-cutting Wednesday is expected to draw donors, state and local officials, students and others to celebrate a facility that’s been in the works for years.

University of Utah Health runs Utah’s only academic medical center and trains approximately two-thirds of the state’s physicians, according to university officials, who said in press material that “its clinical and educational reach extends throughout the Mountain West, including referral areas covering nearly 10% of the continental United States.”

Dr. Bob Carter, a practicing neurosurgeon and executive vice president for health sciences over the entire health system, told Deseret News that the new medical school’s opening comes at a time when medical education is in transition to a new way of teaching and learning about healing and providing care.

The University of Utah is not the first medical school to change things up in this manner, “but we’re kind of in that first wave,” Carter said regarding the transition.

The curriculum and its delivery will be quite different, according to Dr. Kristina Callis Duffin, dean of the new school.

“Curriculum is essentially the roadmap to how our students learn. Medical school usually offers first the foundational coursework: Learn the basic science, basic things about anatomy and physiology and then about organ systems. And then clinical training and more advanced clinical training before more advanced clinical training and residencies where they become apprentice doctors,” she said.

That legacy program ended last year, right in time to welcome new medical students into a very much redesigned program in a spanking new $215 million facility, she said. For four years, the old and new have overlapped. Now only the new approach will carry forward.

And it’s very different.

Teaching and learning in new ways

Among changes, future doctors will be exposed to patients early on, rather than spending the first two years solely in the classroom, followed by six-week blocks of clinical training in subjects like pediatrics, internal medicine, obstetrics and surgery, each leading to a test at the end, said Callis Duffin.

“What we’ve done is integrate clinical training and professional identity formation in a longitudinal way so that early on in the first year students start to go to the clinic with supervision to be exposed to patients,” she said.

That boosts excitement to learn, curiosity about the health challenges they will be asked to solve in their doctor roles and generally improves engagement, she said.

Learning itself is also changing, becoming more team-based, “which is how adults learn well,” she added.

The second phase of medical school education includes longitudinal clerkships. Instead of six weeks of pediatrics before moving on to a different specialty, a student might do pediatrics Monday morning and internal medicine Monday afternoon, with obstetrics on Tuesday, surgery on Wednesday and psychiatry on Thursday.

“So you take the eight foundational areas of medicine and you see some of it every two weeks with the same preceptors over more than a year, which allows a great longitudinal relationship with your preceptor, the doctors that train you and the patients,” per Callis Duffin.

The new medical education design is a more realistic presentation of medical care as it’s actually practiced, Callis Duffin and Carter said.

“One of the nice things, too, is when you’re that young student and you see a patient with a thyroid problem, and then in the anatomy lab you’re learning about where the thyroid is, and then in the basic science lab you’re learning about how the thyroid hormones work, it all comes together. Whereas before it was, you know, the book learning first and then the patients later,” Carter said.

Another benefit of the curriculum redesign is that it is expected to give medical students an earlier sense of what they might want to become in terms of a specialty or general practice, which frees them to focus their studies in phase 3, which is the last two years of medical school.

Mentor relationships are more long term as well, rather than shifting every few weeks.

New venue, more capacity

Against the backdrop of growing workforce needs — including a doctor shortage — in Utah and across the nation — the new medical school has the ability to grow built into its design. And that’s not just for the benefit of would-be physicians.

“More than 500 students from 26 clinical and basic science departments will have access to spaces designed for simulation, hands-on training and collaboration across health disciplines,” the university said in its promotional material.

The building’s Global Health Pavilion will recognize Russell M. Nelson, the late president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a pioneering cardiothoracic surgeon who made groundbreaking contributions to medicine. The pavilion will be a central hub enabling improved collaboration expected to translate into a higher quality of healthcare to address persistent global health disparities.

Carter said the new medical school has been more than a decade in the making and includes the efforts of donors, the community and educators, among others, who have contributed ideas, money, time and expertise.

The facility was made possible in part by a $110 million joint gift from the George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Foundation and the Nora Eccles Treadwell Foundation. The school itself bears the name of Spencer Fox Eccles, a prominent Utah philanthropist and financier and a longtime supporter of the university health system who leads the foundations. The gift also supports an endowment for student scholarships, faculty recruitment, innovative curricula and cardiovascular research.

A few of the medical school’s other features:

• The Dumke Advanced Simulation Center, where simulations will include “everything from actor-patient interviews to advanced simulations such as an intensive care unit stay.
• A state-of-the-art body donor program and cadaver lab.
• A head and neck lab.
• Ample, scattered study and collaboration areas.

The original school of medicine was built in 1965 and to realize the dream of the new one, they split it into three mission-driven parts, including the Helix Building, where faculty have offices. The university also built its Center for Medical Innovation, which is right next door. And now the medical school is launching. All three will work together.

In what Carter calls the “upper campus whole education corridor,” students from the nursing school and medical school can work together on scenario training, as can those learning to be physician assistants and others. In a healthcare setting, those collaborations are common.

“So this building is dedicated to the mission-driven MD curriculum, but it is also designed for collaboration across the building,” said Callis Duffin. “So there’s a corridor, direct tunnel access to the library, right across the pavilion or the courtyard to the nursing school, the pharmacy school, and Eccles Health Sciences Education Building, where other classroom space for the physician assistant school, for example, and other programs are housed.”

This year, the school of medicine is admitting 132 students.

Among the hopes is that some of the students who receive their medical education in Utah will stay in the state, Carter and Callis Duffin said, calling Utah “dead last” in rural primary care physicians per capita.

Because physicians are more likely to stay where they train, the university is welcoming 10 students to its Southern Utah Regional Medical Campus. “They’ll start here and do their foundational, phase 1 year here with their classmates, then will go to St. George in southern Utah for their clinical clerkship training in partnership with southern Utah physicians in Intermountain Healthcare and in community practices there.

“It’s that phase of life, you know, often people are starting families, they’re making connections, and if they do that where they’re having their residency, we think that they’ll stay in spots,” Carter said. “The school has a physical capacity for probably an additional 40 to 50 students. Over time, we do hope to see the class grow, but that’s sort of early days on the curriculum.”

The new school of medicine was built with a combination of “state philanthropy and internal university funding.” It is eight floors tall and about 211,000 square feet. The old grand theater arena-style auditoriums from shows like “Grey’s Anatomy” do not exist in the building. There are learning studios with moveable flat tables that allow students to work in big and little teams. There are individual study carrels on each floor, group learning classrooms, a student lounge and family lounge, which is an uncommon feature in a medical school. It means that while students are putting in long hours studying, there’s space for family to come by and relax and spend some time.