Issue link: https://kusm-wichita.uberflip.com/i/1545861
He has stories about the early days, like the one about the out-of-state physician hired to chair one of the school's departments who introduced himself on a Friday and never returned. "I guess he saw his office was going to be an old hospital room and said, 'This isn't what I was told,'" Minns said. "I guess he just vanished." The school received state money for renovations in the early 1980s, which is when it started to take on the appearance it has today. But there were still plenty of challenges. And the school continued to evolve, becoming a four-year institution in 2011. Prior to that, all KU Wichita students had spent their first two years at KU School of Medicine on the Kansas City campus before coming here for clinical training. The number of incoming first-year students started at eight and now totals 28, with 42 third-year students still coming from the Kansas City campus each year to join the previous second-year students. Fiscal realities necessitated the arrangement. "The reason those students had to do their first two years in Kansas City is we didn't have classroom space for them all to come here," Minns said. "We had been debating for a number of years to see if we could get state support to expand our building so we would have the classroom space. But despite our efforts, we were unable to obtain legislative funding." The political calculus changed in the wake of the pandemic when KU, Wichita State University and WSU Tech proposed a partnership in which all three would occupy a new biomedical center, training physicians, pharmacists, physician assistants, nurses and physical therapists with an emphasis on interprofessional learning. As a result, beginning with the Wichita Biomedical Campus' opening, all KU Wichita students will spend four years here, making for a total medical student body of 280. The pandemic, of course, had posed another set of challenges for Minns and everybody else connected with KU Wichita: What to do about classes for first- and second-year students? How to operate the school's internal medicine clinic, which is staffed by residents and faculty? How to handle rotations by residents and students at area hospitals? "We didn't shut down but we couldn't have in-person classes," Minns said. "So, we had to figure out how to conduct classes by Zoom, on the fast track. And secondly, we couldn't have patients come in, so we had to rapidly figure out if we were wanting to do internal medicine (remotely, via telemedicine). I'm very proud of our chairs and our clinic management for getting that up and going quickly, without much experience in that field of medicine." The school collaborated with local hospitals to find a way residents and students could train and deliver care without putting themselves at risk. "We had to make a lot of adjustments on the fly … determining what our residents' and students' roles could be in helping care for COVID-19 patients," he said. COVID-19 also thrust Minns into the public eye as never before due to his part-time position as Sedgwick County's chief public health officer. After issuing a 30-day stay-at-home for local residents in May 2020, Minns acknowledged that some people thought he should have acted more quickly. "I'd like people to know I'm trying to do the best for all of our citizens," he told the Wichita Eagle at the time. About the time post-pandemic normalcy returned, behind-the-scenes negotiations for the biomedical campus began. Initially, the request was for $300 million to build the first phase of the campus, which would have allowed KU Wichita to move all its operations there. However, legislators L-R: KU Wichita faculty members Jerry Peterie, M.D., and Garold Minns, M.D., assist resident physician David Dennis, M.D. 30