ETSU, UT battle for pharmacy school
Jennifer Calhoun
Issue date: 10/4/04 Section: News
- Page 1 of 2 next >
|
"Absolutely it's a concern," said Dr. Dick R. Gourley, dean of the UT College of Pharmacy. Currently, UT has the only pharmacy school in the state.
UT's concerns began when ETSU President Dr. Paul E. Stanton announced plans during his State of the University Address Aug. 25 to open a college of pharmacy near the James H. Quillen College of Medicine on the Veteran Affairs Campus at Mountain Home.
Stanton said the school would help fill a "severe scarcity" of pharmacists, especially in rural and underserved areas.
"The amount of support for a college of pharmacy among the region's health care community has been most encouraging," Stanton said.
Though ETSU would initially avoid using public money by asking private donors to finance the $10 million in renovations and $6 million for annual operating expenses, future improvements could require public money, said Dr. Peter Rice, associate professor of pharmacology at ETSU.
This could put ETSU directly in competition for state funds with the UT pharmacy school, which quickly announced plans to expand its own program soon after the ETSU proposal was made public.
UT's plan would extend its Memphis-based pharmacy school to Nashville and Knoxville. And like the ETSU plan, it would provide more Tennessee-trained pharmacists across a wider area of the state.
The expansion plan, which UT officials said they had been working on for four or five years, would give UT greater coverage in Middle and East Tennessee and increase class size, possibly eliminating the need for pharmacy school at ETSU.
"All students would spend their first year of school in Memphis," Gourley said of the UT plan.
"After the first year, the class will be split up with some completing their degree in Nashville, Knoxville or Memphis."
But Rice finds it difficult to believe that the state would agree to extend UT's pharmacy school across three campuses over a distance of 400 miles.