Mission Area Updates – II

Good morning.

Today, I’ll follow up last week’s VC Notes that covered some updates and recent accomplishments from our education and research mission areas with the same from the clinical care side of our tripartite mission.

Before I get into that, though, I wanted to take a moment to announce that we’ve scheduled the next speaker in the Vice Chancellor Lecture Series. Dr. Luke Lampton, a 1993 UMMC medical school graduate who now practices family medicine in Magnolia, will talk about his photo and story book, “Images in Mississippi Medicine: A Photographic History of Medicine in Mississippi,” at noon on Tues., April 23 in SOM 124. He’ll share some of what he learned about how the practice of medicine began and evolved in our state, and some of the cool, old photos that are in his book. This should be a fun presentation, and I hope you’ll be able to attend.

Now, on to today’s topic: recent “good news” and updates from our patient care mission area.

Work continues on the build-out of the 6^th floor of University Hospital and the 6^th floor of the Conerly Critical Care Tower with an expected move in December of this year. Fifty inpatient beds will be added, including 18 ICU beds in Conerly and 32 med-surg beds in University Hospital. These are sorely needed to aid in patient throughput and reduce the daily number of patients, who are awaiting a room, holding  in the Emergency Department and Post Anesthesia Care Unit.

Additional specialized patient care areas will open within a year. The UMMC Mississippi Burn Center will move into its new home in February 2025 on the 2^nd floor of the Batson Tower following renovations of the former PICU.

Since being established April 2023, our burn center has been providing multi-specialty care to adult and pediatric burn patients, and in many cases, has allowed someone to get the care they need right here in Mississippi. From July 2023 through January 2024, the center treated 309 hospital-based and ambulatory burn patients. Those numbers are expected to increase over time as additional specialists are added to the care teams in the buildup to opening the new space.

Most of you who live in the Jackson metro area have driven by the construction happening just off the west side of I-55 in Ridgeland, where UMMC Colony Park will be located. The site has been cleared and the construction contract for the first building on the site was recently awarded, so things will really start to ramp up now. You’ll soon see development of a clinical education and patient care facility that will include an ambulatory surgery center.

The center will have six ORs and two procedure rooms and will afford our students and residents an opportunity to learn in an environment similar to their future working environment. Three stories of the building will house medical offices, imaging space, PT, OT,  a full-serve lab and a pharmacy. The new state-of-the-art construction should be ready for move in and patient care activities in roughly two years.

Speaking of patient care, health system volumes are increasing. Comparing where we were five years ago to what we project to be the final totals across all our statewide locations for this fiscal year, we’ve experienced these increases:

• 3.2% in hospital admissions
• 7% in inpatient surgeries
• 43.1% in outpatient surgeries (WOW!)
• 23.5% in outpatient clinic (non-telehealth) visits

This is substantial growth and is an accolade that can be shared by everyone who wears a UMMC badge. Supporting our patient care activities requires everyone, regardless of your title, and when we are all doing our part, percentage increases like these are possible. 

Last week, I included an update on our effort to earn NCI designation for the UMMC Cancer Center and Research Institute, but today I wanted to give a positive update regarding cancer patient care – this time at one of our community hospitals. 

Since opening in November 2015, the cancer clinic located inside UMMC Grenada has been a popular option for cancer patients who live in north Mississippi. As is the case with all of our clinics and facilities across the state, they provide Mississippians a connection to the advanced services provided by the state’s only academic medical center at a location close to home. Patient volume in the clinic has increased nearly fivefold since its first year of operation. I certainly consider this initiative a success and appreciate the work many people have done and continue to do to save these patients a trip to Jackson.

Rounding out today’s column, I want to give some updates on a couple of topics that I’m routinely asked about: food services and campus safety.

I’ve spoken in previous VC Notes about current efforts to establish a new food and nutrition vendor contract. The request for proposals went out last fall, and we are getting close to narrowing the search down to a vendor that we will contract with to assume operations of all cafeterias and patient food services. The winning vendor should be selected this month, and then we will start the negotiation and agreement phases followed by required approval by the IHL due to the size of the contract. We are still several months from it all being wrapped up, but I’m glad to hear we are nearing the end stages.

Thanks to many new initiatives and measures put in place recently and over the past couple of years, we are fostering a culture of safety at UMMC. We are taking a multi-pronged approach to making our grounds and facilities safer, like increased patrol, additional cameras, improved lighting and more tightly controlled building entry/exit points. We are making every effort possible to make our grounds and facilities much less ideal of a target to someone who acts unlawfully. Last month, I was presented with crime data from the 2023 calendar year. A few key metrics I’d like to share with you:

• 22,311 calls for service, which represents an average of 61 calls in a 24-hour period. This shows how active UMMC Police officers are – and how much we rely on them. Of those calls, only 7.8% were of a nature that yielded a police report. It’s good that you trust our police force enough to call them, even if it’s not an emergency or situation that triggers a follow-up report. I know Chief Mary Paradis and her officers are more than happy to respond to anything you need help with.
• Vehicle burglaries (when items are stolen from inside) dropped from 27 in 2022 to 12 in 2023. This is fantastic news and represents a more than 50% reduction in one year.
• Another significant data point decrease is in the number of guns stolen – mostly out of vehicles. In 2022, 15 guns were stolen, and in 2023 that number dropped to only 3. Several factors may have played a part in this decrease and the lower number of vehicle burglaries, but, certainly, its partly due to the significant increase in exposure of our officers and police vehicles.

Increasing access to health care and ensuring the safety of UMMC employees are two important ways we are creating an atmosphere of growth, opportunity and security. This is how we build the future of A Healthier Mississippi.