About a year after The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced a medical school at its flagship university in Provo, officials have selected a location convenient for its future students.
Brigham Young University’s Board of Trustees approved the school to be built on the university’s west campus, near the old Provo High School and Intermountain Health’s Utah Valley Hospital, according to a Monday news release.
The location is important, the release said, because the university expects the hospital to “provide important clinical training for future medical students.”
Construction of the new building should not affect the College of Fine Arts and Communications students, staff and faculty, who currently use the high school, the release said.
Those people are expected to remain in that location until the new Arts Building is finished. Construction on that project began in early 2023, and it “approach[ed] completion” in March. University spokesman Todd Hollingshead said it should be ready by late spring or early summer of 2026.
(Brigham Young University|Josh Dahl) Brigham Young University's new arts building nears completion.
While BYU’s medical school will not spin off into its own hospital, or hospital system, it will offer a Doctor of Medicine (or M.D.) degree, BYU President Shane Reese said a few months after the school was announced.
The plan has always been for students to receive clinical training at other hospitals, like Intermountain Health and the University of Utah, according to university news releases.
“BYU’s future medical school will provide a high quality, spiritually based program that reinforces the mission of BYU and the Church,” Reese said has said.
In October, the board of trustees named Dr. Mark Ott, who led the surgical department and became medical director at Intermountain Medical Center, as the medical school’s first dean.