WHEREAS, The mission of the University of California, Riverside (UCR) School of Medicine is to improve the health of the people of California and, especially, to serve Inland Southern California by training a diverse workforce of physicians and by developing innovative research and health care delivery programs that will improve the health of the medically underserved in the region and become models to be emulated throughout the state and the nation; and

WHEREAS, Inland Southern California is vastly undersupplied with respect to physicians and this region of California has the lowest supply of physicians per capita than any other region of the state, according to the California HealthCare Foundation; and

WHEREAS, In primary care specialties alone, many California counties have far fewer than the 60 to 80 primary care physicians per 100,000 people, which is considered sufficient to meet demand. The Inland Empire has approximately 40 primary care physicians per 100,000 residents; and

WHEREAS, Latinos, African Americans, and Native Americans are vastly underrepresented in the physician workforce, and, in the Inland Empire alone, more than 45 percent of the population is Latino, compared to just 5 percent of the physicians in the region; and

WHEREAS, Inland Southern California also faces a dire health situation, trailing behind much of the state in several key health indicators, including coronary heart disease and diabetes; and

WHEREAS, The UCR School of Medicine has received preliminary accreditation from the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, the national accrediting body for allopathic, or M.D.-granting, medical schools, which enables the UCR School of Medicine to begin recruiting students to enroll an inaugural class in August 2013; and

WHEREAS, To meet the region’s workforce needs and improve the health of the population, the UCR School of Medicine will capitalize on UCR’s nationally recognized diversity and the ethnic diversity of the region by expanding the educational pipeline into medicine; and

WHEREAS, The UCR School of Medicine will also expand UCR’s strength in basic health sciences research to build research expertise in population health and health outcomes research. Through its research, the UCR School of Medicine will address specific health care challenges within Inland Southern California, serving as a catalyst for community-based participatory research leading to innovations in population health, preventive care, and health outcomes; and

WHEREAS, UCR is building its medical school from a long history of training physicians in partnership with the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) David Geffen School of Medicine. The UCR/UCLA Thomas Haider Program in Biomedical Sciences currently educates 28 first-year and 28 second-year medical students. Operating for more than 30 years, this partnership with the UCLA School of Medicine has produced more than 700 physicians; and

WHEREAS, Drawing from UCR’s diverse undergraduate population, the UCR/UCLA Thomas Haider Program in Biomedical Sciences has established a successful track record of recruiting, retaining, and graduating highly qualified medical students from groups that are underrepresented in medicine. A significant number of programs and partnerships currently exist that serve potential medical school applicants through mentorship, pipeline programs, and leadership training; and

WHEREAS, The UCR School of Medicine will continue and expand existing programs, build new programs and partnerships, and track key data concerning the applicant pool and the matriculating students of each class of 50 students. As the UCR School of Medicine increases the class size to 50 students, drawing now from a much larger general applicant pool, the UCR School of Medicine will continue to support programs that enhance the pool of qualified applicants considered for admission; and

WHEREAS, The UCR School of Medicine will also partner with existing health care providers for clinical rotations and residency training, building on the relationships that UCR has already established with the region’s health care providers; and

WHEREAS, The full funding of the UCR School of Medicine would ensure the execution of a vision of the first medical school to be developed in California in more than 40 years, and the UCR School of Medicine is poised to transform medical education by training physicians that will be more attuned to the needs of increasingly diverse and underserved patient populations and will be an outstanding and much needed asset in the state of California; now, therefore, be it