Yesterday, at the Kirk Kerkorian Medical Education Building (MEB), Dean Marc J. Kahn gave his annual State of the School address in which he reflected on the past year and spoke about what is to come in the upcoming year. Below are some highlights from the State of the School, but you can also watch the entire address on the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at UNLV’s YouTube channel.

State of the School Highlights

Education

• Since last year’s address, we have increased our class size by 10 percent. We have also hired 19 new faculty members and are still actively recruiting more.
• In recruiting the class of 2028, we had an 11 percent increase in applications from last year. There were over 1,700 applications for our 66 spots.
• In August 2023, we opened our cadaveric dissection lab at the medical education building to improve our students’ anatomy education. A ceremony was held to honor the four individuals who donated their bodies to medical education. Along with this, we are also in the process of creating our own Anatomical Willed-Body Donation program.
• In our class of 2024, we had 57 percent of them match in residencies in Nevada.
• We received approval for two new graduate medical education programs: a forensic pathology fellowship – we are currently recruiting our first fellow – and a rheumatology fellowship. We already have successfully recruited our first two rheumatology fellows who start training in July.
• In July 2023, the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) awarded us accreditation as a provider of CME for physicians. Dr. Elissa Palmer and her team have been in charge of the school’s CME efforts. With this accreditation, we are able to deliver education that is relevant to clinicians' needs, evidence-based, evaluated for its effectiveness, and independent of commercial influence. Our CME efforts can be seen through our monthly Grand Rounds series and in the recent NFL Health and Safety Super Bowl Medical Summit, a collaboration with the NFL, UNLV Health, and Las Vegas Raiders.

Research

• In the first half of the 2024 fiscal year, we had already received 16 grant awards that total to $6 million and, now, we have 23 active awards that equal approximately $22.6 million. We also have 12 clinical trials that are currently active and eight more being evaluated.
• Since 2023, there have been 370+ results added on Google Scholar and 200+ results added to PubMed of work with credits given to the members of the school.
• The Medical Research Society’s Fourth Annual Medical Student Research Symposium was held in September 2023, and there were more than 65 student poster presentations on various topics.
• In fall 2023, we had 39 residents and fellows present at conferences like the Women in Medicine Summit, American College of Chest Physicians Conference, and the American Heart Association Annual Meeting.

Patient Care

• UNLV Health has opened two new clinics: a second school-based clinic in the Clark County School District Family Support Center and a new gynecology and obstetrics clinic.
• In 2023, UNLV Health hired 13 new APPs and 19 new faculty physicians to support the expansion of services. We are still actively recruiting more practitioners to join us in our goal of transforming healthcare in Southern Nevada.
• UNLV Health has seen more than 50,000 unique patients, 150,000 patient visits, and 65,000 procedures and surgeries performed in 2023. The realization of UNLV Health’s impact has resulted in over $500,000 in support from outside organizations.

Community

• Over the past year, we have provided medical support for events like the Formula 1 race, Electric Daisy Carnival, and other events that cater to large numbers of locals and visitors.
• We opened the UNLV Community Clinic in collaboration with the Volunteers in Medicine of Southern Nevada. This clinic is open Tuesdays from 5 p.m. - 8 p.m. and aims to support the local healthcare needs of Las Vegas.
• Housed within the school of medicine, the Behavioral Health Education, Retention and Expansion Network of Nevada (BeHERE NV) was created with support from the Nevada Legislature and Assembly Bill 37. BeHERE NV is a workforce development initiative to increase the number of providers of behavioral healthcare in Nevada.