Mercer’s new Columbus medical school will help ‘underserved’ Georgians. Here’s when classes start

Local officials and state leaders, including Gov. Brian Kemp and Lt. Gov Geoff Duncan, were in Columbus on Thursday to celebrate the ground breaking of the upcoming Mercer University School of Medicine Columbus Campus.

The campus will be built on six acres west of First Avenue and north of the train overpass adjacent to the TSYS campus.

TSYS, a Global Payments company, gifted the land to the university, which scrapped its plans to turn the Rothschild Building on 11th street into the new campus. The gift of vacant land will allow Mercer to construct a free-built, 85,000-square-foot facility on the land that stretches north from Railroad Avenue to 18th Street.

The campus is scheduled to accept its first class in the fall of 2021, according to William D. Underwood, president of Mercer, with classes housed in temporary quarters until the facility is completed in the spring of 2022.

The school of medicine is expected to increase its enrollment in Columbus to 240 doctor of medicine students over the next several years, equaling the size of Mercer medical school campuses in Macon and Savannah.

“Columbus says they ‘do amazing.’ They do. To borrow the local term, watching the city, county, district and state leaders come together to address the healthcare access for an underserved area of Georgia is absolutely watching amazing leadership,” said Jean R. Sumner, dean of the school of medicine.

Mercer medical students have been doing clinical rotations with Columbus doctors for more than 20 years. In 2012, the Macon-based university expanded its involvement in the local medical community by offering clinical education to third- and fourth-year medical students at Midtown Medical Center (now called Piedmont Columbus Regional) and St. Francis-Emory Hospital. That program has grown from 12 to 40 students in seven years.

Duncan said the new campus is not just about healthcare but also economic development.

“This is about opportunity for us to be able to talk about all of Georgia becoming the Georgia that we want it to be,” he said. “This is (an) opportunity for us to become even better, to continue to look for opportunities to harvest the talent both here in Georgia and all over the country to come here and train medically.”

Gov. Brian Kemp said this investment will help put physicians in rural Georgia, where they’re needed most. He also commended the state’s hospitals and universities for stepping up during the COVID-19 pandemic, and used some of his time on the podium to ask Georgians to do four things this fall to help mitigate the spread of the virus.

“Let’s not have another July 4 spike after this Labor Day,” he said, asking that Georgians avoid large crowds, wear masks in public and social distance when possible. “Just follow the rest of the guidance that we have out there like washing your hands and other policies and rules that we have in place on our businesses. We’ve got our numbers moving in the right direction in most categories and we want to continue to see that and not face another bump after Labor Day.”

This story was originally published September 3, 2020 at 1:02 PM.