Monday, January 28, 2013

MSU Medical Students Coming to Flint

Here's a little good news. The old Flint Journal building in downtown Flint will soon be home to an estimated 100 third- and fourth-year medical students from Michigan State University, along with MSU public health researchers.

Shaun Byron of Mlive reports
MSU's College of Human Medicine had announced plans in late 2011 to expand its medical education and public health programs in Flint, utilizing a $2.8 million grant from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation.

The property consists of 200,000 square feet of building space and more than 5 acres of land.

The lease includes about 40,000 square feet of office and teaching space in the building, according to a press statement from MSU officials.


2 comments:

  1. I wonder how much it would cost to renovate Genesee Towers into hospital space and a parking structure. Seems like an obvious use, but can't say if it would be possible.

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  2. It's practically impossible in the US to rebuild an older building, built for a different purpose and to completely different codes, for primary hospital use. I'd bet a hundred dollars to a donut that there would be economically unresolvable structural, HVAC, elevator and general-utilities problems.

    Besides, Genesee County has (I'm pretty sure) a surplus of hospital beds as it is, relative to the state law requiring issuance of a Certificate of Need before capital expenditure commitments by health care providers. For sure there would be no way to get CoNs for the expensive imaging systems that any primary hospital has to have.

    Unless of course the idea would be to close Hurley so as to be able to get the CoNs...but Hurley is a Level 1 Trauma Center, and has had a great deal of money spent on it, and is in relatively good shape, and already is integrated into multiple teaching programs, and is only about a quarter mile from downtown.

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for commenting. I moderate comments, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You might enjoy my book about Flint called "Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City," a Michigan Notable Book for 2014 and a finalist for the 33rd Annual Northern California Book Award for Creative NonFiction. Filmmaker Michael Moore described Teardown as "a brilliant chronicle of the Mad Maxization of a once-great American city." More information about Teardown is available at www.teardownbook.com.