DHR Health in Edinburg partners with UH to build new medical school campus
Related Story
There's a new partnership between the University of Houston and DHR Health in Edinburg.
Within the next year, construction will begin on a new medical school next to the hospital.
It took just a month in the Rio Grande Valley for UH medical student, Brendan Rosamond, to love the area.
"It felt like everyone was one big family," Rosamond said. "I really didn't expect to love the RGV and McAllen as much as I did."
Rosamond is on his last year of med school, and he watched medical residents and doctors perform surgery and care for patients at DHR Hospital in Edinburg.
It's a partnership between the University of Houston and the hospital.
"As for me, as a non Spanish-speaker, I figured that might be an issue," Rosamond said.
Besides the language barrier, what he really took away was having a greater interest in helping people get better in places like the Valley.
"For me, I'm very focused on community medicine in my career. I plan on being a surgeon that does a lot of academic work with rural health and community health," Rosamond said.
Rosamond was part of a rotation program with the University of Houston Medical School earlier this year, getting up close and personal with patients and doctors and seeing what textbooks won't tell him in real life.
"This is part of what we do, it's kind of in our DNA," UH School of Medicine Dean Dr. Jonathan McCullers said.
This week, DHR Health and the university announced they are taking their partnership in teaching a step forward.
"We'll build a new medical education and research building which will house a lot of those activities," McCullers said.
DHR Health said farmland on the corner of Owassa Road and Jackson Road will be the University of Houston's medical school campus in the Valley. The new building will include a regional dean and faculty.
"We don't have a date yet, but I imagine it'll be in the next year," McCullers said.
Plans are in the beginning stages, but officials said $15 million in state funding has already been given for the project to begin architectural designing and an eventual groundbreaking.
Watch the video above for the full story.
News
