<p>Indian River Community College is close to reaching its $1.25 million fundraising goal to help build a Florida State University regional medical school campus in Fort Pierce.</p>
<p>"The prestige of having a college of medicine in this area and expanding the research coast that we're trying to develop has everyone really excited," said Jimmie Anne Haisley, director of the IRCC Foundation, the college's fundraising arm.</p>
<p>The money raised by IRCC will be doubled with a state matching grant, and FSU is contributing $2 million to the project, Haisley said.</p>
<p>The campaign started last year after former Gov. Jeb Bush vetoed construction funding for the building, but approved $3.4 million in operational expenses to get the program — for third- and fourth-year medical students — up and running at IRCC's Health Science Center.</p>
<p>By June, eight students are expected to begin classes and start rotations at local doctors' offices and at Martin Memorial Health Systems, Lawnwood Regional Medical Center & Heart Institute, St. Lucie Medical Center and Indian River Medical Center.</p>
<p>Eventually, 40 medical students will round out the program once the new Brenda and Vernon Smith Center for Medical Education opens in the summer of 2008.</p>
<p>The center also will house a new pre-med program for honors students that IRCC is still developing.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, FSU has hired a dean and six administrators for the site and wants to hire about 36 Treasure Coast doctors to teach part-time, said Mollie Hill, spokeswoman for FSU's medical school.</p>
<p>Established in 2000 as a "community based" program, FSU's medical school does not have a traditional teaching hospital on campus in Tallahassee. Instead, students spend their last two years doing clinical rotations at regional campuses in Orlando, Pensacola, Sarasota, Tallahassee and now Fort Pierce, Immokolee and Daytona Beach.</p>
<p>"When you introduce medical students into a community where there's no medical school, it really raises the quality of medicine," Hill said. "The doctors are reinvigorated by the students, and the patients love it because they get a little more attention with the students around."
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