--- title: "University of Utah Opens St. George Medical Campus With 10 Students" description: "Utah’s medical schools will graduate about 700 students by 2031, but the state has only 239 residency spots to train them." author: "rews desk" published: 2026-10-09T08:59:03.439Z modified: 2026-10-09T10:30:31Z url: https://rews.cc/a/university-of-utah-opens-st-george-medical-campus-with-10-st-b4414e language: en tags: ["health", "education", "rural", "residency", "utah", "us"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # University of Utah Opens St. George Medical Campus With 10 Students *Utah’s medical schools will graduate about 700 students by 2031, but the state has only 239 residency spots to train them.* By rews desk · October 9, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/university-of-utah-opens-st-george-medical-campus-with-10-st-b4414e ## In brief - The University of Utah enrolled its first 10 medical students at a new Southern Utah campus in St. George this fall - Nine of the 10 students are from Utah and none are from the Wasatch Front - Utah’s four medical schools will graduate about 700 students by 2031, but the state has only 239 residency spots - Each residency spot costs about $200,000 a year; leaders met Sept. 15 in St. George to discuss funding - Intermountain and the university plan to seek state and federal money for residencies in St. George and Cedar City The University of Utah enrolled the first 10 students at its new medical campus in St. George this fall, expanding a program meant to put more doctors in rural parts of the Mountain West where patients can’t easily find one. The students are Rural Medicine Scholars. They spend their first 14 to 16 months at the Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine in Salt Lake City, then move south for the rest of medical school, taking classes in space hosted by Utah Tech University and treating patients at Intermountain Health hospitals and clinics, [according to the university](https://attheu.utah.edu/facultystaff/building-medical-education-in-rural-utah/). Nine of the 10 are from Utah, and none are from the Wasatch Front. Two earned their undergraduate degrees at Utah Tech and two at Southern Utah University. School officials now say getting students to St. George may have been the easy part. What they don’t have yet are residencies, the years of hospital training a doctor needs after medical school, in the places they want these graduates to stay. The numbers are lopsided. Utah’s four medical schools are expected to graduate about 700 students by 2031, but the state has only 239 residency spots, the university said. Each spot costs about $200,000 a year to pay for the trainee’s salary, a supervising physician and clinical space. Leaders from the medical school and Intermountain met at St. George Regional Hospital on Sept. 15, a stop on President Taylor Randall’s yearly tour of the state, to work through how much building space and state and federal money it would take to set up residency programs there. “The University of Utah’s role is to bring sophisticated healthcare education to different parts of the state,” Mr. Randall said. “This collaboration is probably one that we need to repeat over and over again. What we’re doing here today has longer-term ramifications beyond what we’re developing in St. George.” Utah has 60.2 primary care physicians for every 100,000 residents. Rural areas fare worse: 23 of the state’s 29 counties are federally designated Health Professional Shortage Areas. “People come to Southern Utah to live full, active, healthy lives, and yet too many of them struggle to find a primary care physician,” said Dr. Kristina Callis Duffin, the medical school’s dean and chief academic physician. “This is one of the most rapidly growing counties in the nation. If we don’t act now to train and place physicians here, the gap in access to care will only widen.” Where a doctor trains matters. The university cites studies showing that 70 percent of doctors who finish both medical school and residency in Utah stay in the state. The program admits 20 Rural Medicine Scholars a year, 10 who stay in Salt Lake City and 10 who go to St. George, according to the [medical school’s admissions page](https://medicine.utah.edu/programs/md/admissions/southern-utah-regional-campus). Students on the southern track do a rural clerkship in Washington and Iron counties. The St. George campus is one of several efforts. A 2020 grant from the federal Health Resources and Services Administration paid for programs that prepare medical school applicants with a boot camp and tutoring, steer students toward residencies serving tribal and under-resourced communities and place students for up to 11 months in rural clinics. Intermountain also put up a $50 million endowment in April 2021 for a Population Health Scholars program. Students who pick a residency in one of seven specialties, including family medicine, pediatrics and psychiatry, and agree to work four years at Intermountain get half their tuition forgiven. Thirty-three students in the program have said they plan to work for the hospital system. “You have to start on the front end and find the needles in the haystack who want this career path and then make it really easy for them,” said Dr. Michelle Hofmann, the senior associate dean of rural, underserved and regional medical education. That means financial incentives, she said, “but also with curated training that shows them this is doable.” Intermountain and University of Utah Health plan to ask state lawmakers and federal funders to pay for residency programs in St. George, Cedar City and other towns. “I am completely convinced that the students graduating from this first cohort are going to do their residencies and end up back in Utah in primary care,” said Dr. Patrick Carroll, a neonatologist and the chief medical officer at St. George Regional Hospital.