Quick Take
Santa Cruz County could one day have a medical school. UC Santa Cruz Chancellor Cynthia Larive is in early discussions exploring if the university could help fill a void and relieve a local and statewide primary care physician shortage. While no specific timeline has been determined, officials say the planning process could take more than a decade.
UC Santa Cruz is in the early stages of exploring the establishment of a medical school on the campus to increase career pathways for its students and to address a shortage of primary care doctors in the county and the state, Chancellor Cynthia Larive confirmed to Lookout.
“That shortage is likely to grow even worse in the coming years because a large share of doctors and other medical professionals are 65 or older,” she wrote in an email. “As the research university in our region, we could play a role in helping to address this problem.”
Larive previously discussed the idea during a conference of regional public and private leaders, the Monterey Bay Economic Partnership, earlier this month. The discussions are in the preliminary stages and it’s too early for the university to “talk about a timeline for moving forward,” she told Lookout. Similarly, she said that the kind of school, its location and number of students it could enroll would be developed at a later stage of planning.
The university’s consideration comes as a growing number of Santa Cruzans face hurdles finding and scheduling primary care visits. In 2022 in Santa Cruz County, 21.4% of people reported in a California Health Interview Survey that they had delayed medical care or didn’t receive the care they needed, compared to the statewide average of 16.5%. For respondents who identified as Latino and Asian, the rates were higher, at 43.7% and 24.2%, respectively.
The problem exists statewide, as nearly four in 10 Californians live in a primary care shortage area, according to a philanthropic nonprofit focused on expanding health care, the California Health Care Foundation.
Larive said the benefits of a local medical school could extend beyond Santa Cruz County and help improve access to medical care across the entire Monterey Bay region, particularly for patients in need of family medicine, pediatrics, psychiatry and other primary care services.
UCSC currently offers a global and community health undergraduate program and a pre-med post-baccalaureate program, which both prepare students for careers in medicine. Following undergraduate studies, students who want to pursue medicine have to enroll in a medical school – the closest of which include Stanford University’s School of Medicine in Palo Alto and the medical schools at UC San Francisco and UC Davis.
After attending medical school, students with a doctor of medicine (MD) degree are trained in a residency or graduate medical education program to obtain a state license to practice. Residency programs last three to five years and provide specialized training in a range of areas, such as anesthesia or family medicine.
Earlier this year, eight doctors-in-training began three-year medical residencies at Dominican Hospital. The program, a partnership between Atlanta-based Morehouse School of Medicine and Dignity Health’s parent company, CommonSpirit Health, is the first medical residency program in Santa Cruz County’s history. Program staff hope that some residents will choose to stay and make the county their home, thereby improving local access to health care.
“Think about how empowering it would be for a child growing up in a Central Coast community to have a pathway from high school, to community college and the UC Santa Cruz global and community health undergraduate program, then to medical school and doing their clinical rotations in one of the hospitals in their community,” Larive said.
Watsonville Community Hospital CEO Stephen Gray said a local medical school would have a great impact.
“All the local health care providers struggle to recruit physicians, particularly from out of the area, with the high cost of living and everything else,” he said. “So if we have more people who are being trained here, growing up here and wanting to stay here, then that would be better for everybody and better for health care access.”
It’s far too early to know how Watsonville Community Hospital would be involved in the project, Gray said, but he’s been told in discussions with university officials that the hospital would have “a seat at the table” if the plans move forward.
Larive emphasized that UC Santa Cruz is exploring the opportunity and that “a timeline for an undertaking like the launch of a medical school can easily extend 10 to 20 years.”
She added that it would require an investment from the state.
Meanwhile, UCSC faces a budget deficit of more than $126 million, one of the largest in the University of California system despite Santa Cruz being one of the smallest campuses. Officials have said that’s partially due to its lack of the kind of larger revenue sources larger universities have because of their medical schools.
Larive told Lookout that the university’s exploration of a medical school isn’t related to the budget deficit.
“No, this is not related to our current budget,” she said. “Planning for a medical school is on a much longer time horizon.”
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