CU Anschutz In The News

Aurora’s giant employers: Aurora’s aspirations are not lost on Don Elliman, chancellor of CU’s Anschutz Medical Campus. The veteran magazine publisher and former state official said he recognizes that Aurora for years “bristled at being Denver’s poor neighbor." "And it’s still got plenty of issues,” he said. “We happen to be situated smack in the middle of three of the poorest zip codes in the state of Colorado, and we’re very mindful of that fact. We don’t want to be a house on the hill.” Elliman said CU Anschutz has a $2.4 billion annual budget and 2.1 million outpatient visits on campus each year, and it’s still growing on its 578-acre campus. It also has programs that hire people from surrounding neighborhoods and a community clinic provides free care.

Colorado doctors have been prescribing fewer pain pills, and rules regarding such prescriptions have evolved rapidly over the past 5 years, including requirements that doctors check a database that lists all of a patient’s prescriptions, said Robert Valuck, executive director of the Colorado Consortium for Prescription Drug Abuse Prevention and a doctor at the CU Anschutz Medical Campus. “It’s like turning a giant ocean liner around very quickly,” Valuck said. “It doesn’t turn on a dime.”

It’s still seen as shameful and deficient of moral character to be depressed,” said Dr. Spero Manson, director for the Centers for American Indian and Alaska Native Health at the University of Colorado.

In an effort to prevent suicides, local researchers at the University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus have identified 62 locations in the state where a person can temporarily store their firearms outside of the home during a mental health crisis. Faculty with the Colorado School of Public Health and the CU School of Medicine created an online map of those locations that can be used for residents looking for a place to temporarily store their guns.

Race founder Stan Havlick says it’s the oldest charity run in Colorado. Havlick, who would later found the Cherry Creek Sneak in 1982, wanted to create a fundraising race in 1980 when his wife was in a cancer fight with acute lymphocytic leukemia. One of her doctors was Bill Robinson, an oncologist at the University of Colorado Cancer Center who lived in Eldorado Springs, and that seemed like the perfect spot for the race. All proceeds from the race go to the Colorado Cancer Foundation to benefit the CU Cancer Center, Havlick said.

But for medical students such as Aly Sotiros, the stringent abortion laws passed by some states are already playing a role in where they might go for training — or, eventually, to practice medicine. “We traveled to Alabama for vacation a few months ago, and as much as we loved the beach, we said we can’t ever move here because I would be put in jail,” said Sotiros, a student at the CU School of Medicine.

Now a sculpture commemorating the efforts to vaccinate all people against the polio virus, has been dedicated at the Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora.

“That’s what’s always made this difficult, since we’re not doing this full-time,” said Vogl, whose day job is as executive director of National Mental Health Innovation Center on the Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora. “We could change our model to be more like RiffTrax kind of thing, but they already occupy that space.” Even with a better model, it’s is not an easy space to be in, Murphy said. Sensitive filmmakers and distributors often jealously guard their catalogs from movie-mockers, unaware of the new life it can give a film (see revivals of “The Room” or “Miami Connection”).