re: Major plans for new Baton Rouge health district revealed

You realize LSU BR and HSC just setup a BS/MD/PhD in Biomedical Engineering that's completed in 2-3 less years than the normal track?

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You could shift the 3rd/4th year rotations for 50 students each from NO/Shreveport to BR and eliminate the BR rotations for LSUHSC-NO students).

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This essentially already exists- see page 24, black print. The real difference is that it
1) Doesn't expand the class- just selects X number (32 in the first class) to spend their entire 3rd year in BR
2) Doesn't eliminate the Baton Rouge rotations for everyone else, it just limits the spots.
3) I'm not positive, but I'm fairly certain it reduces some amount of financial strain on the system. When I went through, when we got placed at another LSU program outside the City of New Orleans (excluding Kenner, Metairie, your reasonable driving distances), we were given housing on the school (or maybe the residency program's?) dime. Someone other than us paid for it (probably with our tuition, of course, but it wasn't out of pocket is the point I'm making) because we had to keep New Orleans housing for most of the rotations. I'd imagine freeing up 16-32 apartments (we had roommates pretty frequently) from the budget was a piss-drop in the bucket, but it at least did cut down on the number of out-of-town housing paid for by the LSU umbrella.

I agree that another medical school is silly- there's already the Baton Rouge Branch Campus as well as something like 1-4 students who go off to do all of 3rd year in Lafayette as part of the Rural Med program- the idea you touched on has low-scale infrastructure in place and could fairly easily be expanded depending on the end-goal. There was even plans of a 30- or 40-student 3-year campus in Lafayette dedicated to pumping out primary care physicians. There's absolutely a shortage of most fields of physicians in LA. That said, LSUHSC-NO's Class of 2016 opened up a fair number of spots to out of state students without increasing total enrollment. One statement/rumor I heard was that the amount of spots filled by out of state residents would increase revenue by enough to open the 30-40 student campus in Lafayette.

In terms of increasing class size, though, I seem to remember early on, when people still showed up to class, packed auditoriums with no empty seating. In one class in particular, the CRNA's joined us for lecture, and people sat on the floors. That seems like a relatively easy fix, but it does present a real problem that takes some amount of planning/reorganization or construction to fix.


All in all, I think the goals they state are kind of stupid. It may be dumb that the school didn't already exist in BR, but both moving either one there or opening a new one there seems like a worse answer by far. And if the goal is more Louisiana-committed docs, it's a bad idea to open a new school vs expand + commit to BR as you suggest. And if the goal is for them to take a 5-6 year route through school to get another Bachelor's or Master's degree in a field so that they don't wind up practicing medicine, it's still enticing enough to have them just move to BR for those years, in my opinion.

They need add a way to get between I-10 and I -12 from OLOL without getting on Essen! This in itself would fix most of the congestion from OLOL traffic along with building a walkway across Hennessy Blvd by the parking garage.