UF Health Shands Hospital is a teaching hospital of the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. It is one of seven hospitals in the University of Florida Health system, and one of two campuses for UF's Health Science Center, the other being UF Health at Jacksonville. History William A. Shands was a Florida state Senator, elected from the 32nd District in the mid-1940s. He was convinced that the best way to enhance the Gainesville community was to establish a teaching hospital at the University of Florida. There was general agreement that the state needed a teaching hospital, but located in a large city, such as Jacksonville, Miami or Tampa. His dedicated efforts were critical to obtaining state funding for a teaching hospital in Gainesville. The University of Florida Colleges of Medicine and Nursing opened in 1956. Two years later, on October 20, 1958, the UF Teaching Hospital was started. In 1965, it was renamed W. A. Shands Teaching Hospital and Clinics in honor of the man who did so much to make the facility a reality. The institution later became Shands Hospital, part of the Shands HealthCare network. As part of the University of Florida Health Science Center, the hospital is a 996-bed tertiary care facility with 241 intensive care beds. Shands is a Level I trauma center and a leading organ-transplant center. The J. Hillis Miller Health Science Center — named for the former University of Florida president—has expanded since 1956 into the most comprehensive academic health center in the Southeast. The "center" now encompasses six colleges and a statewide network of affiliated hospitals and clinics, including Shands Hospital at UF as the flagship teaching hospital and the neighboring Veterans Affairs Medical Center of Gainesville. The UF Health Science Center comprises the following Colleges: Dentistry, Health Professions, Medicine, Nursing, Pharmacy and Veterinary Medicine. The University of Florida is one of only a handful of universities to have all these health-related professional schools—including veterinary medicine—and to house most of them under one roof. Shands is as a structure connected to the Stetson Medical Sciences Building and the Academic Research Building—both research lab buildings—the Dental Tower, and buildings housing Nursing and Pharmacy. In addition, the Veterans Affairs Medical Center is connected via an underground passage to the ground floor of Shands. Other institutions include the McKnight Brain Institute at the University of Florida, one of the world's largest research institutions devoted