CBS Baltimore reports that for the first time in 45 years, a new medical school at an HBCU is opening and it’s proposed at Morgan State University.
Morgan State plans to partner with Ascension St. Agnes Hospital to launch a for-profit, private medical school aimed to open in 2024.
“Let’s do this for Baltimore, let’s do this for our community,” said Dr. John Sealey, Founding Dean of the proposed College of Osteopathic Medicine at MSU.
According to CBS Baltimore, Morgan State will give underserved minority students an opportunity to live, learn and work in Baltimore.
“If you want to be a doctor there, you’re going to be a doctor there,” Dr. Sealey said. “That’s the whole important aspect of it. You see it, you dream it and you do it.”
The university is anticipating for 700 students and 150 employees to make up the medical school. They believe that there will be an economic impact that will go beyond the college and hospital campuses.
“The economic impact of this school over the course of the next 10 years is probably about $1.2 billion,” said Dr. Sealey.
The school and Ascension St. Agnes hope to not only give back to Baltimore but the rest of the US by producing the next generation of physicians.
“There’s a shortage in the next 10 years, anywhere between 35,000 to 120,000 physicians in the United States of America.”
We want to make sure we’re doing our part in training that next generation and we also want to make sure that the physicians we’re training are coming from the community they’re going to serve,”
– Ascension St. Agnes Chief Medical Officer, Jon D’Souza.
As a community hospital, Ascension St. Agnes said future students will receive training that you can’t find everywhere.
“It’s going to have a strong emphasis on population health. That means we don’t just fix a problem when it becomes a medical issue, we work within communities to prevent problems,” said D’Souza.
