Our Culture

UT Health San Antonio is one of the country’s leading health science universities and is designated as a Hispanic-Serving Institution by the U.S. Department of Education. With missions of teaching, research, patient care and community engagement, its schools of medicine, nursing, dentistry, health professions and graduate biomedical sciences have graduated more than 41,100 alumni who are leading change, advancing their fields and renewing hope for patients and their families throughout South Texas and the world. To learn about the many ways “We make lives better®,” visit UTHealthSA.org.

Our mission is to make lives better through excellence in education, research, health care and community engagement. Strategies for achieving this mission are: educating a diverse student body to become excellent health care providers and scientists; engaging in research to understand health and disease; commercializing discoveries, as appropriate, to benefit the public; providing compassionate and culturally proficient health care; and engaging our community to improve health. Influencing thoughtful advances in health policy.

Two grain silos and a hundred-acre dairy farm have been miraculously transformed over the past few decades to a Health Science Center of international renown. In 1959 Gov. Price Daniel signed House Bill 9, creating the South Texas Medical School. Six years later, the Joe J. Nix Dairy Farm, a wide expanse of grazing land, cattle pens, milking barns and silos to store cattle feed, was conveyed to the State of Texas to build a School of Medicine. On July 12, 1968, The University of Texas Medical School at San Antonio (which had been renamed in 1967) and Bexar County Teaching Hospital (now University Hospital) were dedicated.

Other schools were added in succeeding years, and in 1972 the institution name officially became The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. Today, UT Health San Antonio is a vital part of San Antonio’s $44.1 billion health care and bioscience industry.

Today, the university graduates 200 physicians, 400 nurses, 100 dentists, 560 health professionals in other fields and 130 scientists each year. Additionally, the health science center provides a vast amount of continuing medical and dental education, affords 2.6 million patient visits each year and offers more than $633 million in uncompensated care to the medically indigent.