SALT LAKE CITY (ABC4) – The University of Utah School of Medicine has announced a landmark gift of $110 million from the George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Foundation and the Nora Eccles Treadwell Foundation.
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University of Utah Health is the only academic medical center in the state of Utah, providing patient care for nearly 10% of the geographic area of the continental U.S. The gift will allow the School of Medicine to develop innovations in health care delivery, advance in teaching models and timelines, and eventually make possible an increase in the size of the medical school class.
According to the school, the gift will be used to increase its endowment to power the people and pioneering, innovative programs inside a new building and across the health sciences campus. The gift will also increase the number of medical students and residents, provide scholarship support to alleviate debt burds, and provide pathways to place graduates throughout the region to serve those most in need.
The endowment will take on an innovative role within the School of Medicine, which will now be known as the Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine, by enabling the university to invest seed funding for pioneering initiatives and programs. That may include:
- Innovations in health care delivery, especially for rural and underserved populations
- Efforts to enhance student outreach and reduce student debt
- Advances in teaching models and timelines
With the gift, the School of Medicine says it will accelerate its investment in key research areas that will have the greatest impact on the people of the state and help advance global knowledge. An increased endowment will continue to support research, particularly in the fields of cardiovascular medicine, genomic medicine, infectious disease, mental illness, diabetes and obesity, rehabilitation, and childhood diseases.
In addition, the gift will allow the construction of a new state-of-the-art School of Medicine building to match the people at the university.
“Equipped with ground-breaking teaching and simulation technologies while also centered around human connection, empathy, and collaboration, this new facility will advance medical education in Utah and across the nation for decades to come,” the school says.
The new 248,000-square-foot facility will be built at the center of the university’s health sciences campus and reimagined from the ground up to transform medical education, including:
- The most advanced simulation theaters and technology in the nation will replicate environments placing students directly in mock life-or-death situations, with the opportunity to safely review their medical decisions.
- A medical innovation center will not only train students on the devices of the future but also enable them to design new ones.
- Flexible walls will allow for a variety of spaces to accommodate large collaborative classes or intimate study halls.
- After decades of separation, the building will bring the anatomy lab back to the core medical campus in a spacious, daylight-filled facility only steps away from classrooms. Students will be able to move easily from theory to practice and then back again.