In this address, Dean Marc J. Kahn reflected on the school’s progress within the past year and offered a glimpse of what the school has in store in the year ahead. Below, are highlights from the address. You can watch the State of the School in its entirety on the school of medicine’s YouTube Channel.

State of the School Highlights

• This year, we will be expanding our MD program and will be admitting 66 new medical students, a 10 percent increase and the maximum increase permitted without seeking Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME) approval.
• We are in the process of changing to a more traditional clerkship model, providing students more time to learn roles and responsibilities and giving faculty and residents greater opportunities to identify students’ strengths and weaknesses and provide feedback. Additionally, we are working to align our years-1 and -2 curriculum with Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) core competencies by 2025 while increasing contact time between teachers and learners and expanding our basic science and clinical training.
• Every Class of 2023 graduate successfully matched with residency programs on Match Day, and we were also very excited to welcome the medical students matching to our programs from 24 different states, Puerto Rico, and multiple international locations. We are extremely excited to have 24 of our own medical students staying with our residency programs.
• We currently have 336 residents and fellows in our 11 residency and 11 fellowship programs. We now have a recently approved forensic pathology fellowship that will accept its first two fellows next year, created in partnership with the Clark County Coroner’s Office. Additionally, we have a hematology/medical oncology fellowship and rheumatology fellowship that have been fully-funded and are pending accreditation.
• Dr. Elissa Palmer, interim dean for continuing medical education (CME), is in the process of preparing for the site visit required to achieve national ACGME CME accreditation for the school and has received funding to develop a Project ECHO site within our school.
• From December 2021 to December 2022, we increased our active research awards and sub-awards by 50%. We submitted 53 proposals for more than $167 million and have had 18 of these proposals funded with more than $10 million awarded for the school and another $80 million awarded to the Nevada Health and Bioscience Corporation (NHBC) for the design, development, and partial funding of two new buildings.
• A quick search of Google Scholar and you will find over 200 results since 2022 attributed to members of the school, and PubMed has 135 for the same period of time. Notably, the department of internal medicine had 41 peer-reviewed articles or manuscripts published, the department of surgery had 14, the department of emergency medicine had 11, the department of obstetrics and gynecology had four, and the department of plastic surgery had three. Additionally, our medical students published 29 research articles in 2022, including case reports, full-length research articles, and systematic reviews.
• UNLV Health is focused on becoming an employer of choice for health care workers. They are emphasizing employee engagement, focusing on employee and physician wellness, and added two more paid holidays for employees, matching the 11 holidays observed by UNLV. Our clinical staff are provided a best-in-class benefits package that includes paid time off, medical benefits, no evening or weekend shifts, market value pay, and opportunities for career advancement.
• UNLV Health is in the process of implementing a new patient reminder system and decentralizing patient scheduling to allow patients to schedule directly with the clinics. In addition, UNLV Health will be opening a new multidisciplinary clinic location by fall 2024, and they continue to explore new partnerships as they work to hire 80 new medical doctors and 20 new advanced practice providers by 2025.
• UNLV Health practitioners, including our faculty physicians, residents, and fellows, have supported over 220,000 patient visits in their clinics. Our internal medicine team averages over 102 patient encounters per day in our local hospitals. Our obstetrics and gynecology department has delivered approximately 2,500 babies, and our surgery team has performed nearly 60,000 in-patient procedures.
• With the support of a generous donor, UNLV Health opened a clinic within the Clark County School District’s (CCSD) Bailey Middle School in 2022 and, earlier this year, opened a second clinic with CCSD at their Family Resource Center on Maryland Parkway.
• Our surgery department has taken the lead with a military-civilian partnership (MCP) in urban American trauma centers. There are approximately 42 Air Force physicians participating in this program with 14 of those military members assigned to our surgery department.
• While we hired 10 new faculty in 2022, we are planning to hire more to support our continued growth.