There are just seven weeks left in the 2015 Nevada Legislature. Lawmakers have made much progress in reviewing Gov. Brian Sandoval’s $7.3 billion, two-year budget, which includes about $800 million in new education spending.

Organizers of UNLV’s proposed medical school knew from the start that getting students to enroll in their program before it was fully accredited might be a tough sell.

Any emergency room doctor will tell you that a patient who presents with multiple injuries requires multiple interventions to save his life.

Students won’t arrive for another two years, but Barbara Atkinson, planning dean for the UNLV School of Medicine, has been busy crafting the school’s curriculum, recruiting and hiring faculty and scouring the state for donors.

The needs of southern Nevada’s medical sector are robust by just about every indicator out there: physicians per capita and resident vacancies, to name a few.

The top brass of UNLV and the Nevada System of Higher Education lobbied lawmakers today for $27 million in upfront funding for a medical school in Las Vegas, instead of the $8.3 million proposed by Gov. Brian Sandoval.

The Las Vegas Valley has a growing population of more than 2 million, yet the only allopathic medical school in the state is 450 miles away in Reno, a city with a population of about 234,000.

Southern Nevada lawmakers and leaders may disagree sharply along party lines, but there’s one point on which many of them are in lockstep.

Founding dean of the School of Medicine