Nuvance Health, a seven-hospital system with locations in New York and Connecticut, has pressed pause on its plan to build a medical school in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., due to financial concerns and uncertainty attributed to the pandemic, according to the Poughkeepsie Journal.
The new medical school, slated to be the first between Westchester and Albany in New York, was announced in September 2018. Nuvance Health planned to team up with Marist College in Poughkeepsie to build the facility.
The inaugural class of 60 medical students was expected to start in July of 2022.
However, plans are now on hold due to the pandemic and its effect on the organizations.
"We all thought we had a little too much on our plates and we hit the pause button," John Murphy, MD, president and CEO of Nuvance Health, told the Journal. "We needed to wait a year to reexamine the sensibility of that [project], given everything that's happened to us, the challenges of integration, the impact of COVID."
Both organizations said they may revisit plans to build the medical school in the future.
Read the full report here.