When Dr. Christopher Newman arrived in Fredericksburg to take the top job at Mary Washington Healthcare, he was surprised that the university next door didn’t have a medical school.
“When I look at the number of medical schools from when I trained, there are very few new medical schools, but the population has grown by almost 100 million people in the United States.”
And, he says, Virginia can’t recruit its way out of this situation.
“Because there is a nationwide shortage, so the only doctors that we can recruit to our region we are stealing from another community that needs that doctor as well.”
So the school launched a residency program, taking students who had completed classroom training at the Virginia College of Osteopathic Medicine and Liberty University.
“They started sending medical students for their third and fourth year of medical school for their clinical training, and then we got really great feedback from those students, and that started the wheels turning about – hey, we don’t have a medical school in Northern Virginia. This is an exceptionally acute need.”
At first, UMW President Troy Paino had doubts, but over time he came to see the logic of having a medical school in the area.
“We are the only four-year degree-granting institutions in the fastest growing region here in the Commonwealth – in the Fredericksburg region.”
The health system added a $40 million education building across the street from its main hospital and now hopes to be Virginia’s newest full-fledged medical school. Newman says it would be fundamentally different from UVA or VCU with their emphasis on research.
“They do have a focus on academics, and only about 25% of their graduates ever practice in the Commonwealth.”
On the other hand, UMW President Paino says, Mary Washington will recruit students to serve in places where practicing doctors are urgently needed.
“We really want to hopefully educate primarily Virginians to serve Virginians, and particularly to our mission recruit physicians who have a heart to serve underserved regions and underserved populations.”
So, he says, this medical school would not be as expensive as others in Virginia, and Mary Washington would recruit heavily from historically Black colleges and the University of Virginia at Wise.
Newman feels sure UMW will have no trouble filling the hundred places it hopes to offer to its first class of medical school students.
“Four thousand students are turned away every single year from medical schools, and these are straight-A students who would be fantastic physicians. This is not that they are not capable. It’s just there are very limited spots, and there is a very high demand for those that are willing to become physicians, so we have to ease that bottleneck.”
The university hopes funding for the new med school will come from Mary Washington Healthcare, the state, tuition and donations. The General Assembly has already contributed $1.7 million for planning, and UMW hopes to begin training first-year students in 2030.
