LAS VEGAS (AP) - Las Vegas-area officials say a new medical building at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas will help train more doctors but more steps need to be taken to address a physician shortage.
Nevada has about 200 doctors for every 100,000 residents, which puts the state at 47th in the country.
At a joint meeting this week between the Las Vegas City Council and Clark County Commission, Las Vegas Director of Economic Development Bill Arent told officials that Nevada can’t rely on just trying to recruit more doctors from other states.
“We need to train more physicians locally,” he said, according to the Las Vegas Sun.
UNLV’s medical school, which opened in 2017, is helping is helping to address that, and the creation of a new medical education building for the school is expected to expand the effort.
The medical education building for UNLV’s three-year-old medical school is still being designed and four years of construction is expected start in February 2021, according to interim UNLV medical school dean John Fildes
Once the building opens, the school will be able to train more students raising class sizes from 60 students to 90 or 120, said Maureen Schafer, who leads the Nevada Health and Vital Science Asset Corp., a nonprofit that was created to oversee development of the building.
The new building will be housed within the Las Vegas Medical District, a cluster of medical centers in a 674-acre area near downtown.
Former state Sen. Warren Hardy, a lobbyist involved in the project, said a contractor will be announced for the new building soon and the nonprofit overseeing the project is working with the city to study traffic.
“The message is that we’re moving quickly with this process,” he said.
The city officials welcomed the progress on the medical building, but suggested more steps need to be taken to recruit and keep doctors in Nevada.
Fildes said the school needs to find grants and other funding to expand its medical residency programs, which students are required to complete but are costly and don’t pay as well as professional physician positions.
Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman suggested Nevada state lawmakers raise the rate at which doctors are reimbursed for treating Medicaid patients. Goodman said Nevada’s rate is lower than other states and it could keep more practicing physicians from leaving to work elsewhere.
Clark County Commission Chair Marilyn Kirkpatrick asked the medical school and University Medical Center to continue providing updates to the city council and county commission and to give both lawmaking bodies a list of what the school and medical center need.
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