The landscape along the southeastern section of Memorial University Medical Center’s Savannah campus will change drastically over the next year as the hospital and its partner Mercer University expand and renovate teaching facilities.
The $18 million project will allow Mercer’s School of Medicine to increase its enrollment of medical students from 40 per class on its Savannah campus to 60 in the near future, said William Underwood, president of the private university headquartered in Macon.
“This project is about more than just aesthetics,” Underwood told a crowd gathered at the site Tuesday afternoon for a ceremonial groundbreaking. “This facility will allow the School of Medicine to increase its output of primary care physicians by 50 percent at a time when primary care is one of the great healthcare challenges facing our region ... I could not be more excited that construction will begin in earnest next week with an expected completion date late next year.”
In addition to renovating the existing 26,500-square-foot William and Iffath Hoskins Center for Biomedical Research that currently houses much of the medical school, the project will add 30,000 square feet of new space for classrooms, offices, labs and a library.
Memorial Health President and
CEO Maggie Gill said the expansion and continued partnership with Mercer is beneficial to students, the hospital and the community as a whole.
Training physicians, she said, has long been a major mission for Memorial, which has six residency programs. In recent years about 20 percent of the hospital’s residents have been Mercer Medical School graduates.
“We think it adds to the caliber of services we’re able to offer, and it really speaks to the mission of Memorial — that is medical education, treating the under-served and having tertiary-care level services,” Gill said. “There’s a huge economic impact to the community by having a medical school in Savannah as well as physician residency programs. It’s important not only from a service perspective, but from an economic perspective as well.”
Expanding the Savannah campus will allow Mercer to train even more doctors, who they hope will practice locally, said Dr. William Bina, dean of Mercer’s School of Medicine.
“We’ve always had this goal of becoming a bigger school here, and what we find is that residents and students that train in a place, tend to stay in that place — within 40, 50 miles,” Bina said. “If they train here and they like it, they’re going to stay here, so Memorial is a big part of that.”
Mercer only accepts medical students who are Georgia citizens and aims for the physicians it trains to practice in rural, under-served parts of the state, Bina said.
The school, the dean added, has a track record of placing physicians in those needy areas, as more than 60 percent of its graduates stay in the state and 80 percent practice in those under-servered areas.
“They’re not in Atlanta,” Bina said. “They’re in the counties and areas that really need them.”