There is some good news for the St. Cloud area and for the entire state of Minnesota.
Recently it was announced a St. Cloud campus for a University of Minnesota Medical School. St. Cloud will be the third site for such a school, the others being Minneapolis and Duluth. The school is expected to open in 2025.
The goal of the school in St. Cloud is to attract medical students from greater Minnesota, to train them here and to retain them in practice throughout greater Minnesota.
There is an alarming shortage of doctors and health-care facilities in many of the more rural parts of Minnesota, causing many people in need of care to travel long distances to get the care they need. More doctors, more facilities in those areas of Minnesota will help ease that crisis. That is why this is such good news.
According to CentraCare President Ken Holmen, Centra Care intends to invest about $250 million in the HealthCare Plaza campus in St. Cloud during the next five years in order to support the medical school.
The dean of the University of Minnesota Medical School, Jakub Tolar, said the new school in St. Cloud will help add up to another 10 percent in the number of doctors in the greater Minnesota area over a period of 10 years.
There are about 175 doctors trained each year in Minneapolis, about 65 annually in Duluth, and St. Cloud is expected to train about 25 each year in its first year and up to 80 annually by the end of the decade.
Founded in 1888, the University of Minnesota Medical School now ranks at number eight for quality among medical schools in the nation. The mission of the school is “to be a leader in enhancing the health of people through the education of skilled, compassionate and socially responsible physicians. With three campuses serving diverse populations in rural and urban Minnesota, the Medical School is dedicated to preeminent primary care medicine, exemplary specialty care and innovative research.”
It is expected one third of rural health-care providers will leave the workforce by 2027.
“The best solution to address the physician shortage in rural Minnesota is to train new physicians in the communities in which we want them to serve,” Holmen said.
For the first year or two, the teachers at the St. Cloud school will be selected among those who now teach at Duluth and Minneapolis.
CentraCare is a not-for-profit health-care organization in central, southwest and west central Minnesota. It has hospitals in St. Cloud, Benson, Long Prairie, Melrose, Monticello, Paynesville, Redwood Falls, Sauk Centre and Willmar. It provides primary and specialty care at those hospitals, with an emphasis on rural health care.
Thanks to this new partnership between CentraCare and the University of Minnesota Medical School, we can all look forward to healthier and happier Minnesotans by bringing doctors and health care to areas where they are so badly needed.
