Gov. Phil Murphy will be attending the ribbon-cutting for the Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine at Seton Hall University on May 30 at the site of the school on the former Roche campus in Nutley and Clifton.
Hackensack Meridian Health co-CEO Robert Garrett announced the news during the company’s annual event May 16, and again Thursday morning on New Jersey 101.5 in an interview with host Bill Spadea.
The school will open July 9, and will start with between 50 to 60 students, Garrett said.
“The quality of students is amazing,” Garrett said.
He told the crowd at the annual meeting last week that, of the 2,000 applications, 25 percent were from New Jersey and 50 percent were women.
In addition, the health system’s board approved a $100 million endowment fund to help make the private school affordable.
“We believe in making medical education more affordable and profession more diverse,” Garrett said.
The school is located on a former pharmaceutical site and will be host to clinical research facilities, as well as be the official campus for all health care programs for Seton Hall.
“We know the doctors of the future will navigate a different world,” Garrett said.
He told Spadea on Thursday that the doctors of the future will have to not only care for patients that are sick, but also focus on keeping patients well and out of hospitals.
The advantage the new school provides is having a modern approach to health care, unlike other schools that can be older than 100 years old, which is “like turning a battleship around at full speed,” Garrett said.
So, the new medical school benefits from offering education that will meet the needs of the physicians of the future.
