The doctors and other health care professionals who come out of Creighton University’s Phoenix campus will fill a slice of the provider shortage facing Arizona and the United States.
But they will add to those numbers with something school officials believe is more significant.
“We created a culture of a Jesuit Catholic institution in the West,” said Creighton School of Medicine Regional Dean of Students Dr. Randy Richardson.
“We like to think we provide something more than filling numbers. By providing healing physicians of faith, we’re supplying a physician who’s compassionate. As a patient, I want someone who…really cares about me as a person, from a spiritual, emotional and mental [standpoint] as well as the physical. I think that type of compassionate healer is what most people want.”
On May 18, the university will graduate its first 4-year class of medical students since opening the new Health Sciences building in central Phoenix, the campus centerpiece. Ceremonies will take place at Xavier College Preparatory. They will be held at 9 a.m. for the School of Pharmacy and Health Professionals and 1 p.m. for the School of Medicine. The university will celebrate a baccalaureate Mass the night before at its Doris Norton ballroom at the Phoenix campus.
“I’m very excited,” said Creighton School of Medicine’s dean, Dr. Robert “Bo” Dunlay. “This is the first time in over a century that a new Jesuit Catholic medical school will have a commencement ceremony. So, this is a really big deal.”
Creighton has instructed medical students at its main campus in Omaha, Neb., for over 130 years. It also operates schools in law, arts and sciences, business, nursing and dentistry there.
The school was founded in 1878 by the Society of Jesus, commonly known as the Jesuits.
The nation’s other Jesuit Catholic medical schools include Georgetown University School of Medicine in Washington, D.C., St. Louis University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Mo., and Loyola University’s Stritch School of Medicine in Chicago.
Creighton’s academic presence began in Phoenix in the late 2000s, when the university started sending medical students to Dignity Health St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center for clinical rotations. That relationship expanded a few years later when the university and St. Joseph’s formally established a Creighton campus for third- and fourth-year students. In 2018, it was announced that Creighton would open a full 4-year medical school campus with a new building on part of the former Park Central retail mall on Central Avenue near Thomas Road.
Weblink to Sun 2021 story:
https://www.catholicsun.org/2021/09/14/creighton-formally-opens-new-100m-health-sciences-education-building-in-phoenix/
The new $100 million dollar facility opened in 2021, and while it has been teaching upper classmen there, the 97 medical students receiving their degrees this spring are the first to have gone through all four years of learning there.
“It is one of the biggest culminations of my adult life. It feels like everything has been leading up to this,” said Ava Smesik, a graduate who hails from Beverly, a suburb south of Chicago, and Christ the King Parish in Mesa, Ariz.
“It’s surreal.”
Smesik, who will start a 4-year residency as an obstetrician-gynecologist at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Valleywise Hospital in Phoenix, said the most impactful part of her last four years was working at St. Vincent de Paul Society’s Virginia G. Piper Medical Clinic.
Weblink to SVdP Piper Clinic
https://www.stvincentdepaul.net/locations/virginia-g-piper-medical-clinic
In partnership with Creighton and the Virginia G. Piper Charitable Trust, the clinic provides acute, specialty and preventative health care to the underserved and uninsured. It is Creighton’s primary teaching facility for first- and second-year Phoenix medical students. They learn how to perform an examination at the Phoenix campus, then put it into practice.
“This is where our learners belong; not to go into a clinic but to live alongside those in poverty. That’s what changes them, what changes their hearts,” Dr. Dunlay said.
Fueled by a $10 million grant from the Piper Charitable Trust, the clinic doubled its capacity in 2018, improving laboratory, ophthalmology and pharmacy services.
Weblink to Sun 2021 story on Piper Clinic
https://www.catholicsun.org/2021/03/08/piper-trust-10m-grant-fuels-new-partnership-with-creighton-st-vincent-de-paul-to-improve-health-care-for-maricopa-countys-most-needy/
Piper was Smesik’s “first big” clinical experience. It trained her medically but, more importantly, she said, it taught her in the Jesuit tradition of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the order’s founder, that care goes beyond medicine.
“Seeing physicians volunteering their time to care for the most vulnerable instilled, for me, those same values; caring for the whole person.
“I hope [in my career] to have an impact on patients I come in contact with; leave them with a sense [that] they have an advocate inside the hospital, looking out for them with their best interest at heart who gives them the best care possible, no matter their background, language or knowledge. Just to have that one patient say, ‘I’m so glad you’re my doctor.’ That would be the ultimate, no matter where I’m at, it will be, like, I have made it.”
Latin for “care for the whole person,” cura personalis is the Ignatian spirituality by which Creighton seeks to educate and train students, Dr. Dunlay said, [impressing] that “everybody is a unique gift from God.”
Having students treat patients in that manner, he explained, raises the quality of care and impact upon them; something experts say the medical world is struggling with as providers’ patient lists grow, waiting times increase and the overall doctor shortage deepens.
In Arizona, for example, active physician supply is 31st out of the 50 states, including 42nd in primary care physicians and 43rd in general surgeons, according to the Cicero Institute, an Austin, Texas, based nonpartisan public-policy organization. Rural areas are among the hardest hit.
A number of other states face similar situations; some better, others worse.
Dr. Richardson said each of this year’s 97 graduating students has been matched into a residency program in the United States.
A total of 33 graduates — or about a third of the class — will remain in Arizona. About 20 percent will be going to California. Others will head to places such as Minnesota, Texas and New Mexico.
The largest group will work in internal medicine, followed by diagnostic radiology, the latter a source of special pride to Richardson, who is a professor of radiology and a practicing radiologist.
While most of the graduates staying in Arizona will work in the greater Phoenix area, a few are filling new rural-residency programs in Globe and Prescott. Richardson said the university hopes to establish a similar program in Nogales, Ariz.
All future medical classes will be capped at 120 students; the capacity for the Phoenix Health Sciences campus will soon be home to around 1,000 total students across all programs.
Programs are offered there in medical, nursing, occupational and physical therapy, pharmacy and physician assistants.
Weblink to Creighton Phoenix campus
https://www.creighton.edu/medicine/about
In this year of Jubilee declared by Pope Francis, Dr. Richardson was asked how these graduates will support the late pope’s theme for 2025: “Hope does not disappoint.”
“Being a Jesuit Catholic institution, it really is about hope. Healing brings hope for the opportunity to live a better life, to receive quality care from a compassionate professional whose interest is not just to ‘check the boxes’ but deliver cura personalis,” he said.
“Hope is what we’re really trying to provide.”
