The University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) is a component of the University of Texas System located in Galveston, Texas, United States, about 50 miles (80 km) southeast of Downtown Houston. It is a health care complex spanning 85 acres (344,000 m2), with seven hospitals, 13,000 employees and an assortment of specialized clinics, centers and institutes, including a medical school. The medical school is the oldest one west of the Mississippi River.
It was established in 1891 with one building and fewer than 50 students. Today UTMB's campus has grown to more than 70 buildings and an enrollment of more than 2,500 students. The 84-acre (340,000 m2) campus includes four schools, three institutes for advanced study, a major medical library, seven on-site hospitals (including an affiliated Shriners Burns Hospital), a network of clinics that provide a full range of primary and specialized medical care, a comprehensive medical library and numerous research facilities.
Since its founding, UTMB has served indigent or poor populaces, such as prisoners, the homeless, and single mothers, including patients with ailments that are very expensive to treat (such as burns). It is one of only a handful of hospitals in southeastern Texas that does so. UTMB's Emergency Room at John Sealy Hospital is certified as a Level I Trauma Center and serves as the lead trauma facility for the nine-county region in southeast Texas. It is one of only three Level I Trauma centers in the Greater Houston area.
In 2003 UTMB received funding to construct a $150 million Galveston National Biocontainment Laboratory on its campus, one of the few non-military facilities of this level. It houses several Biosafety Level 4 research laboratories, where studies on highly infectious materials can be carried out safely.
It has schools of medicine, nursing, allied health professions, and a graduate school of biomedical sciences, as well as an institute for medical humanities.
UTMB also has a major contract with the Texas Department of Corrections to provide medical care to inmates at all TDC sites in the eastern portion of Texas. UTMB also has similar contracts with local governments needing inmate medical care.
UTMB is currently in the process of recovering from the effects of 2008's Hurricane Ike.
Read more about University Of Texas Medical Branch: History, Schools, Hurricane Ike, Hospitals and Clinics, Size and Budget, Notable Alumni and Faculty, Heliports
Famous quotes containing the words university of, university, texas, medical and/or branch:
“The great problem of American life [is] the riddle of authority: the difficulty of finding a way, within a liberal and individualistic social order, of living in harmonious and consecrated submission to something larger than oneself.... A yearning for self-transcendence and submission to authority [is] as deeply rooted as the lure of individual liberation.”
—Wilfred M. McClay, educator, author. The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America, p. 4, University of North Carolina Press (1994)
“In the United States, it is now possible for a person eighteen years of age, female as well as male, to graduate from high school, college, or university without ever having cared for, or even held, a baby; without ever having comforted or assisted another human being who really needed help. . . . No society can long sustain itself unless its members have learned the sensitivities, motivations, and skills involved in assisting and caring for other human beings.”
—Urie Bronfenbrenner (b. 1917)
“The pleasure of jogging and running is rather like that of wearing a fur coat in Texas in August: the true joy comes in being able to take the damn thing off.”
—Joseph Epstein (b. 1937)
“One fellow I was dating in medical school ... was a veterinarian and he wanted to get married. I said, but you’re going to be moving to Minneapolis, and he said, oh, you can quit and I’ll take care of you. I said, “Go.””
—Sylvia Beckman (b. c. 1931)
“When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it—a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand—as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there’s a clash between the two, it is bad art.”
—Marc Chagall (1889–1985)