The Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) is a medical provider with multiple hospitals in
Nashville,
Tennessee
Tennessee ( , ), officially the State of Tennessee, is a landlocked state in the Southeastern region of the United States. Tennessee is the 36th-largest by area and the 15th-most populous of the 50 states. It is bordered by Kentucky to th ...
, as well as clinics and facilities throughout
Middle Tennessee
Middle Tennessee is one of the three Grand Divisions of the U.S. state of Tennessee that composes roughly the central portion of the state. It is delineated according to state law as 41 of the state's 95 counties. Middle Tennessee contains the ...
. VUMC is an independent
non-profit organization
A nonprofit organization (NPO) or non-profit organisation, also known as a non-business entity, not-for-profit organization, or nonprofit institution, is a legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public or social benefit, in co ...
, but maintains academic affiliations with
Vanderbilt University
Vanderbilt University (informally Vandy or VU) is a private research university in Nashville, Tennessee. Founded in 1873, it was named in honor of shipping and rail magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, who provided the school its initial $1-million ...
. As of 2022, the health system had more than 3 million patient visits a year, a workforce of 40,000, and 1,709 licensed hospital beds.
Overview
VUMC comprises the following units:
* Vanderbilt University Adult Hospital
*
Monroe Carell Jr. Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt
Monroe Carell Jr. Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt, also known as Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt, is a nationally ranked pediatric acute care Children's hospital, children's teaching hospital and entity of Vanderbilt University Medical Center ...
*
Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center
The Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center is an NCI-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center in Nashville, TN. It is part of the Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
The Vanderbilt Cancer Center was established in 1993 and received its initial NCI design ...
* The Vanderbilt Clinic
* Vanderbilt Bill Wilkerson Center
* Vanderbilt Stallworth Rehabilitation Hospital
* Vanderbilt Psychiatric Hospital
* Eskind Biomedical Library
* Vanderbilt Sports Medicine
* Dayani Human Performance Center
* Vanderbilt Heart & Vascular Institute
*Nashville Biosciences (''aka'' NashBio), a subsidiary spun out from the university in 2018
VUMC also has hospitals, clinics, physician practices and affiliates covering nine hospital systems and 48 hospital locations.
In 2008, the Medical Center moved 23 clinics and administrative offices into the renovated
100 Oaks Mall
100 Oaks Mall (sometimes written out as One Hundred Oaks Mall) is a shopping mall located three miles south of downtown Nashville, Tennessee along Interstate 65 and Tennessee State Route 155. Neighborhoods and cities around the area include Berry ...
in the
Berry Hill section of Nashville, filling of space.
VUMC is known for its teaching hospital and its efforts in electronic medical records. As of 2013, its health care providers saw more than 1.6 million patients each year and its hospitals perform more than 35,000 surgical procedures and see 65,000 patients in its Emergency Room. The Medical Center employed 19,600 staff. Vanderbilt biomedical scientists in more than 100 laboratories conducted more than $616 million of federally and corporately sponsored research as of 2013.
In April 2016 Vanderbilt University and VUMC became separate organizations legally and financially. The two organizations cooperate, and VUMC clinicians continue to serve as faculty members at
Vanderbilt University School of Medicine
Vanderbilt University School of Medicine is a graduate medical school of Vanderbilt University located in Nashville, Tennessee. Located in the Vanderbilt University Medical Center on the southeastern side of the Vanderbilt University campus, the ...
and
Vanderbilt University School of Nursing.
On, August 1, 2019, VUMC completed its acquisition of Tennova Healthcare-Lebanon, a two-campus facility licensed for 245 beds, from subsidiaries of
Community Health Systems
Community Health Systems (CHS) is a Fortune 500 company based in Franklin, Tennessee. It was the largest provider of general hospital healthcare services in the United States in terms of number of acute care facilities. In 2014, CHS had around 20 ...
, and renamed it to Vanderbilt Wilson County Hospital.
As of 2022, VUMC's health system had 1,709 licensed hospital beds and a workforce of 40,000, with more 3 million patient visits a year.
Patient care
Vanderbilt operates the only
Level 1 Trauma Center
A trauma center (or trauma centre) is a hospital equipped and staffed to provide care for patients suffering from major traumatic injuries such as falls, motor vehicle collisions, or gunshot wounds. A trauma center may also refer to an emergen ...
, the only Level 4
Neonatal Intensive Care Unit and the only Level 3 Burn Unit in its region. (Each of those levels represents the highest in its field.)
The LifeFlight helicopter ambulance service has eight helicopters, operated by Air Methods but staffed with Vanderbilt Flight Paramedics and
Nurses
Nursing is a profession within the health care sector focused on the care of individuals, families, and communities so they may attain, maintain, or recover optimal health and quality of life. Nurses may be differentiated from other health c ...
, and an airplane transport and makes more than 2,800 flights a year. Vanderbilt also offers an organ transplantation center. Vanderbilt's first kidney transplant was in 1962; since then there have been more than 3,000 kidneys transplanted at Vanderbilt. VUMC has also had more than 2000 liver transplants and 600 heart and lung transplants. Among Vanderbilt's other transplant milestones were Tennessee's first pancreas transplant in 1985, the first successful heart-lung transplant in the state in 1987, the first pediatric heart transplant in the state in 1987, and the first triple organ transplant of heart, lungs and liver in 2000. The Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center is one of 50
National Cancer Institute-designated cancer centers, and the only one in Tennessee that provides treatment for adult and pediatric cancers. The center is also a member of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network, a non-profit alliance of 21 centers focused on improving quality and efficiency of cancer care.
Monroe Carell Jr. Children's Hospital
![Vanderbiltchildrens](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/de/Vanderbiltchildrens.JPG)
The Vanderbilt Children's Hospital has been in operation since the 1970s, but was housed in the main Vanderbilt hospital until 2004.
[ ]
Monroe J. Carell, Jr., former CEO of
Central Parking Corporation
SP Plus Corporation is an American provider of parking facility management services. It manages parking facilities with more than one million parking spaces across the United States and Canada. Until December 2013, it was known as Standard Parking ...
, raised $79 million for the construction of a new stand-alone facility, including $20 million from his family's personal donations and additional money secured through fundraising efforts.
Research
VUMC ranks in the top 10 among the 126 medical schools in the United States in receipt of research funding from the
National Institutes of Health
The National Institutes of Health, commonly referred to as NIH (with each letter pronounced individually), is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in the late ...
.
Vanderbilt faculty have won two
Nobel Prizes in Physiology or Medicine. In 1971
Earl Sutherland, Jr.
Earl Wilbur Sutherland Jr. (November 19, 1915 – March 9, 1974) was an American pharmacologist and biochemist born in Burlingame, Kansas. Sutherland won a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1971 "for his discoveries concerning the mechanis ...
, received the prize for his discovery of
Cyclic AMP
Cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP, cyclic AMP, or 3',5'-cyclic adenosine monophosphate) is a second messenger important in many biological processes. cAMP is a derivative of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) and used for intracellular signal tra ...
.
Stanley Cohen received a Nobel in 1986, as he shared the award with
Rita Levi-Montalcini
Rita Levi-Montalcini (, ; 22 April 1909 – 30 December 2012) was an Italian Nobel laureate, honored for her work in neurobiology. She was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly with colleague Stanley Cohen for th ...
of Italy for their discovery of
epidermal growth factor, a
hormone
A hormone (from the Greek participle , "setting in motion") is a class of signaling molecules in multicellular organisms that are sent to distant organs by complex biological processes to regulate physiology and behavior. Hormones are require ...
that can speed up certain biological processes.
Some other important research firsts from Vanderbilt's history:
*In 1933,
Alfred Blalock
Alfred Blalock (April 5, 1899 – September 15, 1964) was an American surgeon most noted for his work on the medical condition of shock as well as Tetralogy of Fallot— commonly known as Blue baby syndrome. He created, with assistance from h ...
and his research assistant
Vivien Thomas
Vivien Theodore Thomas (August 29, 1910 – November 26, 1985) was an American laboratory supervisor who developed a procedure used to treat blue baby syndrome (now known as cyanotic heart disease) in the 1940s. He was the assistant to surgeon ...
conducted pioneering research leading to the first
cardiothoracic surgery
Cardiothoracic surgery is the field of medicine involved in surgical treatment of organs inside the thoracic cavity — generally treatment of conditions of the heart (heart disease), lungs ( lung disease), and other pleural or mediastinal str ...
for infants born with "blue baby syndrome". Thomas and Blalock's work was essential to the development of
open heart surgery
Cardiac surgery, or cardiovascular surgery, is surgery on the heart or great vessels performed by cardiac surgeons. It is often used to treat complications of ischemic heart disease (for example, with coronary artery bypass grafting); to c ...
.
*In the early 1940s,
Ernest Goodpasture
Ernest William Goodpasture (October 17, 1886 – September 20, 1960) was an American pathologist and physician. Goodpasture advanced the scientific understanding of the pathogenesis of infectious diseases, parasitism, and a variety of ricketts ...
developed the method of culturing vaccines in chick embryos, which allowed the mass production of vaccines to prevent viral diseases worldwide.
*In the 1950s, Amos U. Christie, chair of pediatrics, led a team that achieved worldwide notice for pioneering work in
histoplasmosis
Histoplasmosis is a fungal infection caused by '' Histoplasma capsulatum''. Symptoms of this infection vary greatly, but the disease affects primarily the lungs. Occasionally, other organs are affected; called disseminated histoplasmosis, it can ...
.
Education
Both the
Vanderbilt University School of Medicine
Vanderbilt University School of Medicine is a graduate medical school of Vanderbilt University located in Nashville, Tennessee. Located in the Vanderbilt University Medical Center on the southeastern side of the Vanderbilt University campus, the ...
and the
Vanderbilt University School of Nursing rank in the top 20 in the ''
U.S. News & World Report'' rankings. The School of Medicine was founded in 1874.
The School of Nursing was founded in 1908. It became a part of the Medical Center in 1984. The School of Nursing phased out its undergraduate nursing degree in 1989, becoming exclusively a graduate school with a mission of educating advanced-level nurses.
Controversies
In March 2014, VUMC was sued by the federal government in a whistle-blower case for a decade-long
Medicare fraud In the United States, Medicare fraud is the claiming of Medicare health care reimbursement to which the claimant is not entitled. There are many different types of Medicare fraud, all of which have the same goal: to collect money from the Medicare ...
scheme.
The university admitted one of its scientists fraudulently falsified six years of biomedical research in high-profile journals.
In May 2015, a federal court ruled Vanderbilt University Medical Center was in violation of the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act for laying off 200 employees without adequate notice and will have to pay out $400,000 pending an appeal.
RaDonda Vaught homicide case
On March 25, 2022 a jury convicted former Vanderbilt University Medical Center nurse RaDonda Vaught of criminally negligent homicide and impaired adult abuse after she mistakenly administered the wrong medication that killed a patient in 2017.
On May 13, 2022, Judge Jennifer Smith ruled that Vaught would not have to spend time in prison, sentencing her instead to three years probation.
Transgender clinic
VUMC opened a
transgender
A transgender (often abbreviated as trans) person is someone whose gender identity or gender expression does not correspond with their sex assigned at birth. Many transgender people experience dysphoria, which they seek to alleviate through ...
clinic in 2018.
Among its treatments, it averaged five gender-affirming surgeries per year to minors over the age of 16 with parental consent since 2018, with none of those patients receiving genital surgery.
In September 2022, right-wing political commentator
Matt Walsh made accusations against VUMC and the clinic.
Walsh said on his show that VUMC doctors "castrate", "drug and mutilate" children. He said on Twitter that VUMC considered gender-affirming care a "money-maker", that it threatened "consequences" for medical staff who declined to provide care, and that it tried to "enforce compliance" from hesitant parents of transgender youth.
Walsh criticized VUMC's "trans buddies" program and called its patient advocates "trans activists".
Walsh tweeted about meeting with Tennessee lawmakers on a bill to shut down the clinic.
In response, VUMC said that Walsh had "misrepresent
dfacts about the care the Medical Center provides to transgender patients" and said that "We have been and will continue to be committed to providing family-centered care to all adolescents in compliance with state law and in line with professional practice standards and guidance established by medical specialty societies".
The VUMC also removed the webpage for its transgender clinic, and its clinic moved from in-person to
telehealth
Telehealth is the distribution of health-related services and information via electronic information and telecommunication technologies. It allows long-distance patient and clinician contact, care, advice, reminders, education, intervention, mon ...
.
VUMC reported harassment and threats against its staff, and there were calls for murders and arrests of VUMC doctors in far-right groups on
Reddit
Reddit (; stylized in all lowercase as reddit) is an American social news aggregation, content rating, and discussion website. Registered users (commonly referred to as "Redditors") submit content to the site such as links, text posts, imag ...
and
4chan
4chan is an anonymous English-language imageboard website. Launched by Christopher "moot" Poole in October 2003, the site hosts boards dedicated to a wide variety of topics, from anime and manga to video games, cooking, weapons, television, ...
.
Speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives
Cameron Sexton
Cameron Sexton (born November 11, 1970) is an American politician serving as a Republican member of the Tennessee House of Representatives for the 25th district. He is the 83rd and current Speaker of the House in the Tennessee House of Represen ...
, a Republican, said that "Your biological sex at birth is your identity", and promised to pass legislation that would ban gender-affirming healthcare for minors. Republican
Governor of Tennessee Bill Lee requested an investigation into the hospital.
Jace Wilder, Education Manager of the
Tennessee Equality Project
The Tennessee Equality Project is an LGBT organization in the United States state of Tennessee.Frances Green, ''Gayellow Pages USA 2008-2009'', Renaissance House, 2008, p. 40/ref>
Overview
The Tennessee Equality Project was founded on June 15, 200 ...
, said that "They are using trans kids as political pawns. They're saying this is going to protect kids, but this is going to further perpetuate violence."
On October 7, 2022, VUMC announced that it would pause gender-affirming surgeries for minors and review its practices.
In response, Tennessee House majority leader
William Lamberth
William Gary Lamberth (born December 5, 1977) is an American politician. , a Republican, said that "This is a win for the safety of our children, but we're committed to ensuring this never happens in Tennessee again".
Rankings and awards
VUMC was ranked as the best hospital in Tennessee in the 2014 annual ranking by ''
U.S. News & World Report''. In the 2014 annual rankings by the magazine, the following VUMC specialty programs were nationally ranked: Cancer; Ear, Nose and Throat; Nephrology; Neurology and Neurosurgery; Pulmonology; and Urology. High performing specialty programs were: Cardiology and Heart Surgery; Diabetes and Endocrinology; Gastroenterology; Geriatrics; Gynecology; and Orthopaedics.
Vanderbilt University was named in ''Fortunes "100 Best Companies to Work For" list for 2009. More than 80% of the university's employees work for the Medical Center. The other rankings VUMC has achieved include being listed in the 100 Top Hospitals by Truven Health Analytics; being listed as among the nation's 100 "Most Wired" hospitals by the American Hospital Association; and listed as one of the "100 Great Hospitals in America" by Becker's Hospital Review.
Vanderbilt is also the home of BioVU, one of the world's largest DNA databanks, which holds more than 170,000 samples and is used to discover new genetic predictors of disease and drug action by scientists worldwide.
The center has also hosted an award since 2006, the Vanderbilt Prize in Biomedical Science, which honors "women who have made significant contributions to the science of medicine".
References
External links
Vanderbilt Medical CenterVanderbiltHealth.com - For Patients and Visitors
{{authority control
Vanderbilt University
Hospital networks in the United States
Organizations based in Nashville, Tennessee
Healthcare in Tennessee
1874 establishments in Tennessee
Medical and health organizations based in Tennessee
Trauma centers
LGBT-related controversies in the United States
Transgender history in the United States