First medical school that will be opened in Chicago in almost 100 years will strive to curb a shortage of doctors

The new medical school of the Chicago School will register students in the autumn of 2026, making it the first to open in Chicago in almost 100 years – just in time, the staff hopes to tackle the national shortage of doctors.

The Illinois College of Osteopathic Medicine, the first osteopathic medical school in Chicago, will strive to integrate mental health care and physical health education to “think whole person in wellness,” said Chicago school president Michele Nealon.

“We strive to be a leader in redefining what it means to train a doctor in the 21st century, in which osteopathic principles are combined with a mental and behavioral health foundation,” Nealon said.

At the beginning of last month, the school received its approval before waking the Commission on Osteopathic College Accreditation, making it an official medical school that is able to grant a doctorate to Osteopathic Medicine. The school is now undergoing the recruitment and admission process to register the inaugural class.

The first class will only be 85 students to start with, but after the first two cohorts have been registered, the school will graduate to 170 students every year, according to Nealon.

The medical school is being built in the former Tyson Foods building in the West Loop and plans to open the facility in the end of 2025. The space of 247,000 square feet has eight floors of classrooms, laboratories and collaborative studies. The Chicago School issues around $ 48 million in construction costs and the expected economic impact of 10 years is expected to be $ 1 billion, with $ 4.8 million in taxes, according to Nealon.

Nealon said that tackling the mental health crisis of the country and a shortage of doctors in the vanguard was in the mission of the school to go back to early discussions that founders had in 2022.

“The timing of the conversation was very urgent and strategic. The country is confronted with a critical shortage of doctors and chicago and Illinois are in the epicenter of that,” Nealon said.

According to the American Hospital AssociationThe US will be a maximum of 124,000 doctors by 2033. And according to the Chicago school, Illinoisans need more than 1,000 extra primary school doctors by 2030 to meet the increasing demand.

Osteopathic medicine is a branch of medical practice in the US that focuses on a “whole person” approach to health care, including physical and mental health. Only about 25% of all medical students choose to go to the osteopathic school.

But it’s a growing field. According to Dr. Teresa Hubka, president of the Chicago -based American Osteopathic Association, there are 42 colleges and 67 campuses throughout the country that offer the degree, and the profession currently has nearly 200,000 active practitioners.

Hubka said that more osteopathic medical schools are needed to tackle the lack of doctor. According to the statistics of the AOA 2024, approximately 57% of all students of Osteopathic medicine go into general practice, where they are often the first point of contact for patients in hospitals and urgent care clinics.

Dr. John Lucas, the founder of the new school, said that the school hopes to attract more ethnic and racially various doctors to the field. Only about 12.2% of all 2024 students registered at the osteopathic medical school currently comes from under -represented backgrounds, according to the annual report of the American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine.

He added that the school will also give priority to the mental health of its students in a time when burnout ‘at an all time is high in every specialty’.

“We lose a lot of doctors,” he said. “So we have to encourage students to look for care when they need it, and not to have a stigma around looking for help for things.”