Medical students studying at Baltimore’s Sinai Hospital will have their tuition partially covered by a $10 million donation, the latest local charitable donation to help defray the high cost of medical training.
Bloomberg Philanthropies announced in July that it was giving Johns Hopkins University a $1 billion grant to enable it to offer free tuition to medical students starting this fall.
The grant to LifeBridge Health, Sinai’s parent company, is specifically aimed at increasing the number of primary care physicians locally. The system launched a program last year for students from George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences to train at Sinai.
The donation will be used to establish an endowment fund called Sinais Regional Medical Campus for the clinical training program for third- and fourth-year medical students. The program focuses on caring for patients from underserved communities who often have greater medical care needs.
The donation is the LifeBridge system’s largest to date and comes from Ellen Wasserman, a member emeritus of LifeBridge Health’s board of directors. She has previously given to the system to improve children’s health. The new donation brings her total gift to LifeBridge to $24 million.
“We are so grateful to Ellen Wasserman for this transformative gift to invest in the training of future physicians who we hope will practice in our communities,” said Neil Meltzer, president and CEO of LifeBridge Health, in a statement. “Ellen trained as a social worker and truly understands the challenges faced by so many of our patients.”
There are currently 15 George Washington students training at Sinai, but 60 are expected in the next two years. Each of them receives a tuition scholarship of $10,000 per year. Tuition at George Washington Medical School is about $63,000 annually.
Students rotate through a variety of specialties, including family medicine, internal medicine, pediatrics, psychiatry, obstetrics/gynecology, and others.
Sinai also offers clinical rotations for medical students from the University of Maryland School of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and others. And former students have received tuition assistance from other philanthropic donors.
The high tuition fees have become a significant hurdle for students, especially those from low-income families, and have contributed to the nationwide shortage of doctors.
The average cost of annual tuition and fees across the country exceeds $41,000 for in-state students at public medical schools and $58,000 for out-of-state students. Private medical schools like Hopkins cost an average of $60,000, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.
Many medical Students must take on significant debt, with the average debt at graduation in 2022 being $200,000 nationwide, which has led some, particularly in underserved areas, into higher-paying residency programs rather than primary care.
The donation “will support our students in this special learning environment and community-focused program,” said Dr. Scott Krugman, a pediatrician and senior associate dean of the George Washington Program at Sinai.
“Current RMC students have told us how much they value the personalized, hands-on education and training they receive at Sinai, as well as the connections they can build with their patients and our larger community.”
