The Big Picture [Welcome to Your New Home]

Good morning.

Here in the busy onboarding month of July, I would like to extend a sincere welcome to you, our new residents, students, faculty and employees.

Soon, if not already, you will be focused on the finer details of your work/learning here at UMMC. So, I can’t think of a better time to take a look at the Medical Center’s “Big Picture” to give you, our new colleagues, classmates and co-workers, a better idea of who we all are.

And, for those of us who have been a part of this institution for a while, please let this serve as a reminder of the difference you’ve already made, and will continue to make, in the lives of the people of our state.

We are Mississippi’s only academic medical center, or what used to simply be called a “teaching hospital.” Yes, we teach, and yes, we are a hospital – six, in fact, including University Hospital, Children’s of Mississippi, Wiser Hospital for Women and Infants, and Conerly Critical Care Hospital. Besides those on-campus facilities, we have two community hospitals: UMMC Holmes County in Lexington and UMMC Grenada.

We also have the state’s only Level I trauma center, only children’s hospital, and only organ and bone marrow transplant program. The Medical Center is home as well to a Health Resources and Services Administration-designated Telehealth Center of Excellence, one of two in the nation.

Truly, UMMC has the state covered, with our 35 clinics, 200-plus telehealth sites and learners blanketing Mississippi from Booneville to Bay St. Louis, Natchez to New Augusta, Moss Point to Marks. We have much of Mississippi’s airspace covered, too, through AirCare, an emergency and critical care transport service with helicopters stationed in Jackson, Meridian, Greenwood and Columbus.

As you may imagine, it takes a lot of people to fulfill our missions: more than 10,000 full- and part-time employees, making UMMC one of the largest employers in Mississippi.

On top of that, we embrace more than 2,400 students enrolled in our seven campus schools – dentistry, graduate studies in the health sciences, health related professions, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, and population health. Some notable facts about our schools: The dental school is the only one in the state, the students in the School of Medicine are 100% Mississippians and our Bower School of Population Health was the third one of its kind in the country when it was founded in 2016 and is still only one of six.

The total climbs to more than 3,000 when you add fellows and residents – who are not just learners; they provide care for our patients and also teach our students.

UMMC has an annual budget of roughly $1.8 billion. Many don’t realize that the legislature only funds about 10 percent of that overall figure through state appropriations, and all of those funds go to support our educational programs.

Most of our revenue comes from patient care, and smaller, but critically important, portions from research, tuition and philanthropy. 

But, in addition to providing education and patient care, we are also committed to our research mission, to finding treatments and even cures for the patients we serve: vital work that extends beyond Jackson, reaching nearly all areas of the state. Our research is supported by more than $110 million annually in external grant funding.

That’s a lot of numbers and information, but they all add up to our overall, indispensable purpose: to deliver family- and community-based research, patient-centered clinical care and health professional education.

In the end, we are not measured by ledgers, but by lives bettered and saved. So, welcome to your new home; I hope you discover why so many of us believe it is a home to be proud of, as we all work together leading the way for A Healthier Mississippi.