Healthcare in the Inland Empire is hard to come by, but UC Riverside is trying to fix that with plans for a new teaching hospital for its school of medicine.

The project will expand access to primary and specialty care for patients, and open local residencies to medical students at the university, said UCR Health CEO Tim Collins. 

“We want to build that up and bring more physicians to the marketplace to provide world-class care to the community,” Collins told CalMatters in an interview.

California doesn’t have enough primary care providers, particularly in rural areas, and the Inland Empire faces some of the most pressing shortages, the Los Angeles Times reported. About 62% of people in San Bernardino County and 42% in Riverside County have inadequate healthcare access.

“Even compared to our coastal neighbors, the Inland Empire is particularly strained when it comes to resident-to-physician ratios,” the Inland Empire Health Plan Foundation stated in an article on doctor shortages. 

The UC Riverside project aims to expand medical access, starting with a 20-acre site in Riverside off of Interstate 2015 near State Route 60, about five miles from the university campus.

The university has leased the land from a private firm, TDA Investments, and will develop it with the company. About 12 acres will house an outpatient center and hospital and another eight acres will include a parking structure and medical office building.

The first phase will start with the outpatient center, which Collins said will be a one-stop shop for services such as diagnostic imaging, outpatient surgery, oncology and digestive health.

“It will integrate all the offerings that we call out-patient that do not require a hospital,” and cost less than providing those services in a hospital, he said. 

As that’s built out, the university will begin work on the 280-bed hospital. The university doesn't have a definite timeline for those facilities yet, Collins said.

Further down the line, the university may lease a separate 22-acre parcel across the street that could provide space for medical research, conferences or biomedical business incubators, he said.

UC Riverside also expects to open a series of outpatient medical centers throughout the Inland Empire “located in geographic areas where there are gaps in services,” Collins said.

The Inland Empire has 42 primary care physicians and 83 medical specialists per 100,000 people. In comparison, there are 60 primary care doctors and 131 specialists per 100,000 for California as a whole, Collins said, citing a report by the California Health Care Foundation. 

Residents of Riverside and San Bernardino Counties often travel to neighboring Los Angeles, Orange or San Diego counties for specialty care such as cardiology or oncology, he said. 

Part of the problem is that the pipeline to train and recruit doctors in the Inland Empire isn’t well-established, Collins said.  

UC Riverside opened its medical school in 2013, and 454 physicians have graduated since then. It’s the only University of California medical school without its own hospital, and it has trained students at other hospitals in the area through partnerships, the Riverside Press-Enterprise reported.

About three-quarters of medical students at UC Riverside have ties to the region and half come from underrepresented groups, the university reported.

But most of those students have to leave the region to complete their medical residencies, and once they go it’s hard to get them back, Collins said.

“By building the network of facilities, we’ll be able to expand the number of residencies we’re able to offer in this marketplace and retain those physicians that are trained here,” he said.

A group of California lawmakers and immigrant advocates visited an ICE detention center in San Bernardino County, where officials refused them entry, KTLA reported. 

Democratic Reps. Judy Chu, of Pasadena, Gil Cisneros of Covina and Derek Tran of Cypress traveled to the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement facility in Adelanto with members of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union.

The group visited the high desert to view conditions at the center where many immigrants detained during recent raids in Los Angeles are being held. Cisneros said they tried to conduct congressional oversight at the facility, but officials “locked the gate, ignored our calls and denied us entry.”

After the Redlands Unified School District Board took aim at transgender athletes in April, local churches are rallying to support trans students and other LGBTQ youth, the San Bernardino Sun reported.

A coalition of Redlands churches wrote a letter this month calling for the school board to protect LGBTQ students. Church leaders took issue with some board trustees who want to remove Pride flags from classrooms and who encouraged the California Interscholastic Federation to bar transgender athletes from sports that don’t align with their gender at birth.

The eight pastors said they stand for the right of people of any gender identity to live free from discrimination, violence and injustice in schools.

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