Sacramento Area Commerce & Trade Organization

Even as University of California Davis prepares to open a $46 million medical-education building at its Sacramento medical-center campus, planners are working to expand the new space by one-third to make room for more students and programs.

The university's $35 million expansion plan would include a 40,000-square-foot addition to the new building, which opens this month. The addition would serve as a statewide telecommunications hub to support medical care in rural areas. It would also have an expanded "virtual care" center to allow med students to practice on robots before they work on patients.

The big plans are part of a much broader vision for the University of California system to train many more healthcare professionals to serve a growing need.

The move could boost the local economy with a payoff of more good jobs and a healthier community.

"Sacramento has diversified broadly but not risen to a leadership position in anything -- Intel and H-P didn't do that for us after all," said Robert Fountain, a professor emeritus and director of the Applied Research Center at California State University Sacramento. "The tide is rolling now for biomedicine as the industry of the future, but right now, the only card we hold is UC Davis."

But with the medical school in one place and the necessary infrastructure around it, Sacramento will be well-positioned to be a regional leader in the industry, Fountain said.

"We're pretty excited about it, mainly because we see (the chance for more) spin-off research institutes" such as the nationally backed UC Davis Cancer Center, said Robert Burris, deputy director of the Sacramento Area Commerce and Trade Organization. "It really improves the capability of the whole cluster there to do clinical research, which is becoming a forte in our region, especially in the area of diagnostics."

The first new addition is the medical-education building. It's scheduled to be dedicated Monday; students would begin to use it when the winter quarter begins in January.

The 121,000-square-foot, four-story building is located at 45th and X streets, on a direct line between the main hospital and ambulatory care center. The idea was to provide a campus-like atmosphere that puts classrooms and study space on a pathway between inpatient and outpatient care, said Dr. Tom Nesbitt, executive dean for administration and outreach.

"When we first established the medical school in Davis, we looked for a hospital there. When we got the county hospital (in Sacramento), the students were not there. Now, finally, we have it all together," he said.

For the first time, the dean's offices are on-site, too.

The building was recently named "the best higher-education project" of 2006 in Northern California by California Construction Magazine. Carrier Johnson, an architecture and interior design firm in San Diego that has a Sacramento office, designed it. Sundt Corp. was the general contractor.

"Carrier Johnson is a first for us," said associate director for facilities Mike Boyd. "We took a little risk after looking at their excellent education structures and the San Jose library" shared by the city and San Jose State.

Natural light streams through a four-story elliptical rotunda. There are 17 small classrooms that can hold up to 16 students, six 30-seat classrooms, one 60-seat auditorium and two 150-seat auditoriums. All have high-tech audio-visual equipment for students in the room and to beam the sessions to remote parts of the state.

A well-appointed clinical skills area looks like a medical office, with mock exam rooms and waiting areas so students can role-play with patient actors to learn diagnostic skills. A 14,000-square-foot medical library, open to the public, has 44,000 volumes, augmented by computers for searching and special collections on Civil War medicine and bioethics.

"Scrubs East," a cafe on the ground floor, will offer light fare and a hit of caffeine.

"The biggest difference for students is all being together," said Amy Harley, a third-year medical student interested in internal medicine and infectious disease. "A lot of older students have experience the first- and second-year students can benefit from, not to mention the state-of the-art facility."

The Davis digs are windowless, cramped and not designed for students with big backpacks and laptop computers, Harley said.

"There's not a lot of light, and I've had to fight off having a nap."

The plans for a second building got a big boost on Election Day. Much of the funding for a second medical-education building on the Sacramento campus is expected to come from Proposition 1D, the $10.4 billion ballot measure approved by California voters on Nov. 7.

The initiative provides the entire UC system with almost $700 million for facilities and an additional $200 million to expand medical-school programs and enhance telemedicine efforts across the state. UC Davis has a proposal in the works for $35 million for an addition to the medical-education building and to expand enrollment at the medical school.

The money jump-starts a strategic plan presented to UC Regents last month that would boost medical-school enrollment across the university system by almost 1,000 students by 2020 and open a sixth medical school -- the first in 40 years. It appears likely to go to either UC Riverside or Merced.

The plan also recommends a new veterinary school and increased enrollment in veterinary medicine, nursing, pharmacy and public health to respond to a growing shortage of health professionals in the state. The UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine could see its annual graduating class increase by 30 students to 160 and the number of residents rise from 50 to 90, dean Bennie Osburn said.

The recommendations are preliminary and will go through further review, said UC spokeswoman Jennifer Ward. But UC Regents did approve a budget that includes Proposition 1D money to help fund the plan.

The medical school at UC Davis would add 12 students per graduating class under the proposal, bumping up the number of annual graduates from an average of 93 to 105. The new students would be part of a new training program that teaches doctors to use telemedicine to treat patients in rural areas, Nesbitt said.

Current predictions estimate that within a decade, the state will face a shortage of anywhere from 5,000 to 17,000 doctors, with the worst deficits in rural areas.

The new telemedicine facility is designed to serve as a communications hub between Sacramento and remote areas of the state, allowing rural doctors far from specialty care to consult with specialists via video on difficult cases. It would also be the lead resource for telehealth efforts among the five UC medical schools.

Groundbreaking is "at least a year out," said Ann Bonham, executive assistant dean for academic affairs. The plan would move the virtual care center in the main hospital to the expanded building and triple its size to give students greater opportunities to practice their skills on robot patients that simulate reactions to the treatment.

"Students today are very comfortable with technology," Bonham said. The new medical-education building opening next month and plans for its eventual expansion show students that UC Davis is willing to spend a lot of money to make it available, she said.