A message from Dr. Michael Gardner, president and CEO of UNLV Health and vice dean of clinical affairs at the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at UNLV

Ever since the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at UNLV opened in 2017, you’ve come to know its group practice as UNLV Medicine. During this time, you could feel confident when you visited any one of our 17 clinics that you were being treated by expert physicians and other providers who are leaders in their chosen fields.

That remains true today. But with each passing day, our group practice has come to be about more than diagnosis and treatment. It is also about helping to transform health care in our region through prevention and wellness programs, research, education, and collaboration — all of which are sure to accelerate as the development of an academic health center as UNLV picks up steam as a top-tier research university,

With that in mind, we believe it’s time for the name of the multispecialty group practice of the medical school to better reflect the scope of its work. We believe a change to UNLV Health does just that. 

UNLV Health is a health care organization of more than 350 people who understand that good health is the greatest wealth, who appreciate the World Health Organization's definition of health as “a state of optimal physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”

There is no doubt that our faculty physicians — they are training both medical students and postgraduate fellow and resident physicians, as well as improving the lives of patients — will play a pivotal role in Nevada’s first academic health center, which can go a long way toward improving health locally.

With five health care professional schools in nursing, integrated health, community health sciences, dentistry, and allopathic medicine, UNLV is perfectly poised to bring teams of physicians, nurses, a wide range of health care professionals, researchers, academic faculty, and other medical experts together to advance the region's health care.

As we move forward as UNLV Health, we will continue to embrace frontiers that invite us to reach beyond our comfort zones. 

That enterprising mindset has already provided the sense of urgency necessary to carry out curbside testing for COVID-19, to quickly set up vaccination sites for the virus, to treat patients struck by the virus in the ICU with novel treatments, and to offer suggestions on how to relieve stress and anxiety in the age of COVID-19.

It is also a frame of mind that has spurred an ever-growing body of research, including the exploration of new methods of injury prevention, of finding unique ways of caring for the elderly and for examining where stem cells can treat heart disease. 

In the coming weeks and months, we will communicate much more about the planned role of UNLV Health in our community.

UNLV Health — through caring, healing, teaching, and discovering, and by creating dynamic, productive partnerships that focus on measurably improving health locally, we pledge to provide the best possible health care to the people of Southern Nevada.