Construction for Ivins medical college underway

Students interested in pursuing their medical careers locally can now have a glimpse of what will soon be Southern Utah’s first medical school.

Construction on the Rocky Vista University College of Osteopathic Medicine-Southern Utah branch at 255 E. Center Street in Ivins began around the beginning of April with the facilities needing to be completed before classes start the summer of 2017. The school has an approved class size of 125 students and will be able to take up to an 8 percent overage.

The Utah Rural Health Scholars Program at Dixie State University and Southern Utah University have contracted with Rocky Vista to allow an early acceptance to qualified students. The program is expected to expand to pre-med students at other colleges and universities within Utah as well.

Julie Rosenthal, executive director of admissions and marketing, said she has been visiting universities around Utah and has found an increasing amount of interest in Rocky Vista from students wanting to pursue medical careers. She said she expects Brigham Young University to be a top feeder school in addition to DSU and SUU.

David Park, vice dean and Southern Utah campus dean, said the application process for students across the country is slated to begin June 15 and officials are in the middle of hiring staff to help with interviewing candidates. Park said the school will start recruiting faculty in January 2017.

With the curriculum approved, university officials are focusing on how the medical classes will be taught to students.

“Our big flagship push is going to be using technology and innovation to drive the future of medical simulation and surgical simulation,” Park said. “We are going to have a medical simulation center built inside the school to have hands-on practice and skills developed before they even see and touch a real patient.”

The 18-room clinical assessment simulation clinic will incorporate standardized patients, or actors performing as patients in medical situations, to interact with the students to help prepare them for real-life clinical cases. Using standardized patients during the schooling process has already been implemented at Rocky Vista University in Denver.

Students will also be working with veterans at the Southern Utah Veterans Home located at the adjacent property to the north of where the school is being built.

“All of our students will be assigned to a vet and they’ll have a longitudinal relationship with that person,” Rosenthal said . “So that’s going to be very valuable.”

Now that construction is underway, Park said he is working on forming relationships with hospitals across Utah in preparation to start building clinical rotation sites for the third and fourth year students. Additionally, he has been having conversations with several hospital systems about building new residency programs in the future in order to secure spots for Rocky Vista’s future medical students once they graduate.

“Our expectations are that we will certainly elevate the level of medical education to the folks in the region,” said Rocky Vista Dean Thomas Told. “I’m also a native Utahn who grew up in Southern Utah and my hope is to provide a lot of the physician workforce that was not available when I was down there.”

Follow Nichole Osinski on Twitter, @nrosinski, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/osinskireporter. Call her at 435-674-6231 .

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