Funding floodgates for New Mexico’s health care system are officially open.
During this year’s legislative session — which Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham dubbed a “health care session” — lawmakers concerned about a growing provider shortage directed hundreds of millions of dollars at the problem.
This session brought especially massive spending on the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center, with investments totaling more than $475 million for construction on a new UNM School of Medicine facility, expansion of rural residency options open to UNM doctors in training and improved pay for faculty. Eventually, the investment is expected to double class sizes at the UNM School of Medicine — the state’s only allopathic medical school.
Big investments create big expectations, acknowledged Dr. Michael Richards, executive vice president of the UNM Health Sciences Center and CEO of the UNM Health System. Under House Bill 2, the state’s budget bill for fiscal year 2027, the Health Sciences Center will be evaluated on the percentage of UNM-trained primary care doctors still practicing in the state three years after residency, as well as the number of students who pass their respective licensure exams.
Richards called the institution’s efforts to expand the state’s supply of medical providers part of its mission.
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“Our job is to help improve the health of the state of New Mexico,” he said. “And one of the ways that we do that as an academic medical center is that we train the health care professionals, not just for ourselves, but for all of the state of New Mexico.”
Richards added, “This work is our work to do, and we look forward to doing it.”
New medical school
A new medical school was by far the biggest item on the UNM Health Sciences Center’s wish list this year.
“We went into the session with the request to get the appropriations necessary to do the construction and equipping of the new school of medicine replacement facility,” Richards said.
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The university is planning to construct a new building — at a cost of about $600 million — to replace its medical school’s primary building, Reginald Heber Fitz Hall, which was constructed in 1967. Design work was funded during a previous legislative session, with the building planned for construction at the corner of Lomas and University boulevards in Albuquerque.
The infrastructure improvement would enable UNM to double its medical school enrollment — expanding class sizes from about 100 to about 200 — while opening up more space to train physical therapists, occupational therapists, physician assistants and other health professionals.
By the end of this year’s legislative session, the UNM Health Sciences Center had secured $150 million from the state’s general fund, plus another $280 million in capital outlay. A $116 million higher education general obligation bond for the new medical school will go before voters in November.
That, plus a $60 million contribution from UNM, brings the project’s grand total to $606 million.
If all goes according to plan, Richards said the building will be open to students by July 2030.
Somebody will have to teach those students, a reality the state’s budget bill recognized with a $21.5 million appropriation to increase pay for clinical medical faculty.
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Between 75% and 80% of funding for the school of medicine currently stems from UNM’s “clinical delivery system,” or the medical services UNM Health provides throughout the state, Richards said.
“Over the last several years, the school of medicine faculty who were delivering clinical services had much smaller or no raises because the clinical delivery system was not in a position to fund those those raises,” he said.
The additional state investment will ensure faculty salaries are “more in alignment” with nationwide rates, Richards added, which will help recruit and retain providers to work at UNM and teach the facility’s doctors in training.
Support for residencies
Doctors’ training doesn’t end after medical school.
They also have to complete what’s called graduate medical education — a yearslong process designed to ensure doctors get the hands-on training they need to practice independently. That includes a three- to seven-year residency under the supervision of an attending physician, and it often involves a fellowship during which doctors specialize in certain areas of expertise.
Neither residents nor the hospitals they work for have control over which resident fills which spot; they’re both at the mercy of an algorithmic match process. But completing residency in a certain location can entice some doctors to stick around in the longer term, particularly in rural areas.
New Mexico’s investments this year in growing the pipeline of physicians also account for residencies, especially rural residencies.
Lawmakers set aside $24 million for UNM to administer a program that offsets the cost of rural residencies and residency rotations at rural clinics, psychiatric facilities and critical access hospitals.
“This additional funding allows those rural hospitals and clinics to be able to host those residents and fellows without having to take on the cost of those residents and fellows,” Richards said.
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UNM is the major institution training resident physicians in the state. An analysis conducted by The New Mexican in November found New Mexico had 84 accredited medical residency programs, 74 of which were offered through the University of New Mexico School of Medicine. Nearly 800 of the approximately 850 resident doctors training in New Mexico were completing their residencies through UNM.
One of the state’s few non-UNM-sponsored residency programs — housed at El Centro Family Health clinics across Northern New Mexico, in partnership with Christus St. Vincent Regional Medical Center and Presbyterian Española Hospital — closed its doors in 2025, due to a cocktail of recruitment, retention and funding issues. It left the Española Valley with eight fewer family medicine doctors.
Residency programs housed outside of large teaching hospitals tend to face a funding pickle: Residents’ salaries are paid through reimbursements from the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services — but only when they’re practicing at a host hospital or affiliated clinic, Richards said. Funding typically doesn’t follow residents if they choose to complete a residency rotation at a rural clinic or hospital.
“This state support allows those residents and fellows to go to those rural sites without it creating a financial burden on those rural sites, which makes it much easier for them to participate,” Richards said.
Dr. Kristy Riniker, a Rio Rancho-based doctor and vice president of the New Mexico Academy of Family Physicians, is a product of a rural residency program. Despite moving to another state after finishing graduate medical education, New Mexico called her back.
Consistency remains an issue for the state’s few rural residency programs, she said: “New Mexico has done a fairly good job of starting up these rural residency programs, but haven’t had as much support in keeping them.”
The recent rural residency program closure led policymakers toward a rural rotation model — where residents travel to rural clinics and hospitals for short periods of time while remaining affiliated with a central hub.
But Riniker argued, “I don’t think it should be either/or. I think it should be both.”
There’s more work to be done to support providers teaching residents, many of whom teach in addition to taking on a full patient load to meet student loan repayment benchmarks, Riniker said. And she argued the state should consider directly funding rural residency programs, rather than funneling funding for rural programs through UNM.
“Having students out in rural practices for one month and having all of those resources going to the central hub at UNM, I think is helpful,” Riniker said. “But I think it would also be helpful to have some of those resources going to those rural hospitals, to those independent physicians out in rural areas, to really support the students and residents who would like a longer term commitment in those areas.”