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Nov 14, 2008 8:00 am US/Central
UTMB Retains Academic Status
GALVESTON (AP) ―
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University of Texas Medical Branch
The University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston will remain academically accredited as a medical school despite the loss of 3,800 jobs, officials said.
However, UTMB will continue sending medical students to health facilities elsewhere to gain clinical experience, officials said. Since Hurricane Ike's landfall in September, the school's third- and fourth-year medical students have served their clinical rotations at hospitals across the state.
The UT Board of Regents unanimously approved the job cuts Wednesday during a meeting in El Paso, saying they want to keep the medical school in Galveston but could not allow it to continue losing as much as $40 million a month since Ike hit the island in September.
UTMB President Dr. David Callender said Thursday he hopes to meet with employees by the middle of next week to let them know who will lose their jobs.
"What we're trying to do is determine how many people we need for the (hospital) configuration the regents have defined," Callender said in a telephone interview from El Paso, where he was meeting with UT regents. "It will mostly be people employed in our health system. We're going to try to figure out who we need, what we need for the future," he said in a story for the Houston Chronicle's Thursday online edition.
Officials will follow UT rules in determining who is laid off, he said, and seniority will be one factor.
Employees will be paid through mid-January.
Ike caused nearly $710 million in losses to UTMB, which has 12,500 employees with 8,000 working on the island campus. Officials have said that only about $100 million of the damage from the Sept. 13 hurricane is covered by insurance.
(© 2009 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)
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