Quick take:
UC Santa Cruz is launching a new medical training program in partnership with UC Davis, aiming to address a regional physician shortage and lay the groundwork for a future UCSC medical school. The initiative, part of the UC PRIME program, will begin in 2027 with six students and focus on training physicians with local ties to the Central Coast.
UC Santa Cruz’s new medical training program with UC Davis will start with just six students, but the partnership represents an important step toward solving a critical health care shortage in the region and eventually establishing a medical school on campus, according to UCSC professor Grant Hartzog, the leading faculty for the program.
“Assuming that we’re successful in this, this will be the most important thing I’ve done in my career,” said Hartzog, who teaches molecular biology and global and community health courses.
The initiative, part of the UC Programs in Medical Education (UC PRIME), would be based within the UC Davis School of Medicine in partnership with UCSC. Students who have completed pre-med requirements and who are admitted to PRIME through UC Davis conduct their first two years of studies at the Davis school. During their third year, they’ll do clinical rotations in the Central Coast region, including in Santa Cruz health facilities – which ones, Hartzog said, are under discussion.
While UCSC Chancellor Cynthia Larive has expressed hopes for a full-fledged medical school on campus, Hartzog sees the PRIME program as a crucial first step toward that goal.
“That’s a long ways away for us,” he said. “But you know what we can do right away is get more people into medical school and get people with the local ties so that they’re more likely to come back here, rather than to go to San Francisco or Los Angeles.”
He added that one of the most significant indicators of where a physician ultimately practices is where they trained. Studies have shown that more than half of physicians work within 100 miles of where they did their residency program. Dominican Hospital launched the county’s first physician residency program in Santa Cruz County last summer in hopes of bringing more physicians to the area.
Hartzog said starting a UCSC medical school will take much longer than a couple of years.
“Let’s say you’ve got a medical school with 100 students, then you need clinical placements for 100 third-year students per year, and 100 fourth-year students per year, that’s a lot of clinical placements,” he said. “So you need to have partnerships with a huge number of physician mentors and multiple clinical sites, and that just takes time to develop.”
The university’s current approach allows UCSC to grow a program over time organically, he said. Hartzog said the PRIME Central Coast program was launched with $1.5 million from the state budget by State Senator John Laird. While the $1.5 million helps them plan the program’s development, the school will need to secure permanent funding from the state in the future.
The PRIME Central Coast program will start accepting its first students next year. Hartzog said the school expects to start with six students in the first cohort. Those students will begin at UC Davis in the fall of 2027 and then will have their rotations in Santa Cruz health care facilities in the fall of 2029. After students complete the four-year program, they typically go on to a residency where they practice their specialization and earn a physicians license.
Hartzog and UC Davis representatives met with health care providers from Watsonville Community Hospital, Dominican Hospital, Natividad Medical Center, Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula and others in May to discuss partnerships for the program. He said each facility they partner with will have a director and a mentor to help run the program.
As for UCSC’s part in the program, he said faculty will work with physicians from the region on student admissions. UCSC staff will also be identifying the clinical faculty, or physicians who will mentor and supervise the students, and will hire the staff who will be in charge of scheduling the student’s clinical rotations in the facilities.
“That’s actually a fairly complicated task,” Hartzog said about scheduling. “That usually happens about a year in advance.”
Hartzog added that the launch of the program is happening amid cuts to Medicaid funding, which affect the medical facilities that they’re in discussions with.
“People are nervous about the future,” he said.” And on the other hand, people are also nervous about a looming crisis in physician retirements and declining physician workforce. And so there is a lot of motivation to find ways to get people here.”