By MATT PIKE
St. Joseph Post
After wrapping up its first year of rural health education, a UMKC campus located at Mosaic Life Care in St. Joseph, will be getting some help.
Mosaic Chief Medical Officer Dr. Edward Kammerer says the fund received from the federal government will help with some much-needed expansion to the UMKC School of Medicine.
"We're needing to expand site and access for them, this will expand some laboratory capabilities for them with regards to studies for dissection, for anatomy labs," Kammerer tells reporters. "And so, these funds will go into an improvement of services to kind of give them the full-scale medical school experience."
Kammerer says that the program takes on 20 students every year during the three-and-a-half-year program, which would result in 80 students on campus after three years.
Kammerer says that if they can get even half of those students to pursue rural healthcare, that would be a big win.
"This is the pipeline and the future of rural medicine, you really have to have a specialty," Kammerer says. "This is a great commitment by UMKC, because we really need that commitment to rural healthcare, to experience what it is to live in a rural community, to thrive in a rural community, and then practice in a rural community."
Kammerer says the expansion will start, once Mosaic and UMKC know how to allocate the federal money properly.
"There are lots of stipulations inside of those federal dollars that require certain things," Kammerer explains. "We're actively working with UMKC right now to understand those so we're compliant with all the federal regulations of does this need to be on campus, attached, there's a lot of different stipulations."
Kammerer adds that Mosaic has met with the UMKC building team several times and toured the facility.
"We haven't nailed that down yet until we can make sure that we meet all the regulatory components for appropriate utilization of those funds," Kammerer says.
The program at the school of medicine has quickly outgrown the space they were provided over the first year, prompting the need for expansion.