The University of Mississippi Medical Center, located in Jackson, is the state's only academic health science center. UMMC includesseven health science schools: medicine, nursing, dentistry, health related professions, graduate studies, population health, and pharmacy. (The School of Pharmacy is headquartered on the University of Mississippi campus in Oxford.) Enrollment in all programs is more than 3,000 students.
The Medical Center's three-part mission is to improve the lives of Mississippians by educating tomorrow's health care professionals, by conducting health sciences research, and by providing cutting-edge patient care. A major goal of the Medical Center is the elimination of differences in health status of Mississippians based on race, geography, income, or social status.
Integral to its education and research missions, UMMC provides wide-ranging patient care programs. Three specialized hospitals on the Jackson campus include the only children's hospital in Mississippi, a women and infants' hospital, and a critical care hospital, along with University Hospital. UMMC offers the only Level 1 trauma center, the only Level 4 neonatal intensive care nursery unit, and the only organ transplant programs in the state, in addition to many other referral services. University Physicians, the faculty group practice of the School of Medicine, includes about 500 doctors, many of them among leaders in their field, who care for patients in the hospitals and clinics on campus, around the Jackson metro area, and in outreach clinics around the state. UMMC includes two community hospitals, UMMC Holmes County and UMMC Grenada.
The University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson is the health sciences campus of the University of Mississippi. The Medical Center opened in 1955, but its beginnings date to 1903 when a two-year medical school was established on the parent campus in Oxford. In that era, certificate graduates went out of state to complete their doctor of medicine degrees.
Finally, in 1950, the Mississippi Legislature - by a one-vote margin - enacted a law to create a four-year medical school. On July 1, 1955, the state's new University Medical Center, or UMC as it was commonly called, opened in Jackson, initially as a four-year medical school with medical and graduate students, interns and residents. As it had in Oxford, the School of Medicine offered both medical and graduate degree programs. The campus included a teaching hospital and a library.
The Oxford campus' nursing department moved to the Medical Center in 1956 and it was granted school status in 1958. The School of Health Related Professions (SHRP) was added in 1971 and began offering baccalaureate curricula in 1973. The School of Dentistry was authorized in 1973, and its first students were admitted in 1975.The graduate program was elevated to school status in 2001 and designated the School of Graduate Studies in the Health Sciences. A seventh school on the UMMCcampus was dedicated during a September 2016 ceremony officially announcing the John D. Bower School of Population Health.
The Medical Center functions as a separately funded, semi-autonomous unit responsible to the chancellor of the University of Mississippi and, through him, to the constitutional Board of Trustees of State Institutions of Higher Learning, which governs all eight state institutions of higher learning in Mississippi. The Medical Center's chief executive officer is the vice chancellor for health affairs.