California is building a new health program at UC Merced. Will it lead to more Latino doctors?
Gov. Gavin Newsom and higher education leaders on Monday visited the future site of UC Merced’s medical education program, which would serve a building block for the San Joaquin Valley’s first public medical school.
Proponents of the highly anticipated project said the program would lead to more doctors serving in the Central Valley, as well as a diverse physician workforce that reflects the region’s Latino community.
Newsom spoke at the site of a planned $210 million medical building that would anchor a program for students studying health sciences, public health and behavioral health sciences. It’s designed to feed into a graduate medical school at the Fresno campus of the University of California, San Francisco
“This was driven, in large part, by the critical lack of health care professionals in the Central Valley, a problem that has only gotten worse in the last 28 months” said UC Merced Chancellor Juan Sanchez Munoz. “We know from the medical literature that medical professionals are more likely to establish practices in the places where they were educated and underwent their residency.”
For years, the Central Valley has faced a critical shortage of physicians.
“There are 157 medical doctors for every 100,000 residents in the Central Valley, compared with 411 per 100,000 in the Bay Area,” according to figures released by the governor’s office.
Meanwhile, Latinos in the state account for 39% of the state population, but makeup just 11.6% of the state’s medical school graduates, according to a 2020 analysis by UCLA.
Calls to increase the state’s Latino physician workforce have been magnified amid the COVID-19 pandemic that has disproportionately impacted Hispanic Californians. In Merced County, Latinos represent 61% of the county population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
“To have a physician who speaks the language that they speak, or someone who is within your same ethnicity or racial group, could definitely help in the type of care and trust that these patients have in the healthcare system,” said Arturo Vargas Bustamante, an associate professor at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health.
It will be critical, however, to create incentives or programs to keep physicians and primary care providers in the Central Valley after they graduate, Bustamante said.
Newsom in a visit to UC Merced stressed that he wants to the new program to attract medical students who will go on to practice in the San Joaquin Valley.
“They will come here in the Valley and they will stay in the Valley. They will contribute and they will serve the residents and the people that made their education possible,” Newsom said. “That’s exactly what we are promoting here today. That’s the promise and it’s a promise we can deliver.”
UC Riverside hosts the state’s newest public medical school. In 2020, UC Riverside’s medical school graduated 69 students, according to data by the Association for American Medical Colleges. Among them, 16 students were Latino and 19 students were white.
The medical school that graduated the most Latino students in 2020 was UC Davis. At UC Davis, Latinos represented about a quarter of the 2020 graduating class, surpassing white medical school graduates.
Overall, about 10.8% of the 1,224 medical school students who graduated from California medical schools in 2020 identified as Latino.
The first cohort of undergraduate students at UC Merced’s medical school will begin their first semester in 2023. The institution expects to serve more than 2,000 undergraduates by 2030. The school will contain the Medical Education Program, Health Sciences Research Institute, as well as psychological sciences and public health departments.
This story was originally published October 26, 2021 at 5:00 AM.