City Hospitals Reach $11 Million Scholarship Deal With Medical School in Grenada

Over the last few years, St. George’s University Medical School on the Caribbean island of Grenada has come under fire from New York City medical schools for paying to have its students trained in the city’s public hospitals, turning what local schools say should be an academic relationship into a fiscal one.

Now St. George’s and the city’s public hospitals are further cementing their financial relationship with a deal that will provide $11 million in scholarships for New Yorkers to attend St. George’s over the next five years. In exchange, they must promise to work as primary care physicians in the city’s hospitals after graduation.

The deal will give out 25 scholarships — 5 full and 20 half — in the first year, and the value of 40 full scholarships in the four years after that, officials said. The scholarships are to be financed entirely by St. George’s.

Alan Aviles, president of the city’s Health and Hospitals Corporation, which runs the public hospitals, said at a news conference on Wednesday that the deal was a way of attracting badly needed internists, family medicine doctors and pediatricians to hospitals serving poor patients, and would be a boon to New Yorkers who might otherwise not be able to afford medical school tuition.

“This will make the dream of medical school come true for some talented New Yorkers,” Mr. Aviles said at Metropolitan Hospital on the Upper East Side, where he was joined by Charles Modica, St. George’s chancellor.

He cited projections that the nation faced a shortage of more than 90,000 physicians by the end of the decade, and said that city hospitals expected a wave of retirements that would exacerbate the shortage. About 35 percent of primary care physicians in the public hospital system are over 55, he said.


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