Mississippi Today
UMMC didn’t fully meet criteria for burn center, March report shows
The March inspection of the University of Mississippi Medical Center for its burn center designation showed the health system failed to fully meet almost a third of criteria required to host the state’s next burn center, though it was recently deemed qualified to do so anyway.
UMMC communications officials refused to answer Mississippi Today’s questions about the current status of its burn program, including its staff’s training. A Facebook post, however, shows that since the health system’s application to host a burn center was submitted and the subsequent site visit was conducted, more staff have undergone the training required to care for burn patients.
The Mississippi Department of Health said UMMC has submitted a corrective action plan to address the shortcomings, but declined to provide it without a records request. UMMC officials refused to engage with Mississippi Today about such a plan.
The surgeon on the team that performed UMMC’s March site visit said the results of their site visit are not uncommon.
Dr. William Hickerson, who helped establish Memphis’ Firefighters Regional Burn Center and served as the past president of the American Burn Association, said the health system has what it needs to establish a burn center.
“My impression was that they have set things up very well,” he said. “You’re not going to be able to open your doors and say, ‘Bring them (the patients) home.’ This is not the Field of Dreams … You have to have a team approach. Everything has to be in a learned environment, and you start slowly like these guys are and build up now. And I think that that is exactly what we saw and what their plans were that they showed us.”
The Institutions of Higher Learning last month approved UMMC’s request to use $4 million of its own money to create a new burn center. The hospital system will renovate the first floor of the Batson Tower into a new burn unit, with ICU beds and rooms for patients recovering from surgery.
Officials visited UMMC on March 21 to review the health system’s credentials and see if it was qualified to host the state’s next burn center. That team consisted of Hickerson, Terry Collins, a nurse who directs the trauma program for the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, and Teresa Windham, a trauma system nurse in the state Health Department’s Bureau of Acute Care Systems.
In May, Mississippi Today requested the results of that visit.
Originally, a state health department attorney said the survey was exempt from disclosure and cited costs that totaled nearly $20,000 for communications regarding the visit.

After Mississippi Today asked the department to cite state law that exempted the survey results, however, a health department official attached the survey in an email thread.
The results of the survey showed that out of 155 categories, UMMC either “partially met” or did not meet criteria in 46, or 29.6%, of the categories.
Though UMMC was docked in the report for not having an internal burn education plan in addition to lacking certain required staff, policies and procedures, the survey results showed they excelled in team coordination, specifically between its trauma and burn surgeons.
“This cooperative plan is one of the best these reviewers have witnessed,” the report says.
Since the state’s only burn center housed at Merit Health Central in Jackson closed in October, both UMMC and Mississippi Baptist Medical Center have vied for the designation. Despite gaps in both its application to host a burn center and this site visit, UMMC received its approval in April from the Mississippi State Department of Health.
“I’ve been through several hospitals and several reviews, and we don’t come in to rubber stamp anything. It’s to give an honest opinion of what we see the capabilities are, and we report the findings,” Hickerson said. “I know there’s a competition. I’m on neither side. I’m here to give you the facts of what I see.”
A director of an out-of-state burn center and officials with the American Burn Association declined to comment on how UMMC’s site survey results compare to others who have been approved to host a burn center.
State health department spokesperson Liz Sharlot responded to questions about UMMC’s qualifications with an emailed statement that included information about the state’s Trauma System of Care and their goal of enabling “access in Mississippi, rather than out of state, for burn patients and their families.”
Mississippi Today found in February that UMMC had sent at least one burn pediatric patient out-of-state for treatment.
“Keeping this goal a priority, MSDH works with entities seeking a burn center designation to ensure that safe and effective care is provided through a well defined operational plan for clinical care and service delivery,” the health department’s statement reads. “Such plans may include corrective actions for any deficiencies noted to allow entities to continue to build their burn care programs. This process includes a revisit or focused visit to ensure corrective actions are taken to maintain a burn center designation.”
Hickerson said that it’s common to check in with burn centers a year after their establishment to ensure they’re in full compliance, but as of his March visit, he believes the health system is capable of hosting a burn center.
“The whole aspect is to make sure that you set something up that is going to be safe for the patients,” he said. “Yeah, they didn’t have a complete check. But they had means that they were gonna fix that.”
At the time of the survey, UMMC was still actively recruiting for staff, including nurses, pharmacists, dietitians and psychiatrists. The report also showed that the health center struggled with ongoing burn education and internal training. At the time of its application, which was submitted earlier this year, an internal burn education program was being developed.
The site survey reports that the burn center medical director, Dr. Peter Arnold, has the required criteria to lead the unit, which can be achieved two ways. The first includes being a surgeon with board certification in surgery or plastic surgery and completing a one-year fellowship in burn treatment. The second route is experience in the care of patients with acute burn injuries for two or more years during the previous five years.
However, it’s unclear how Arnold meets those criteria — Arnold has not completed a one-year burn fellowship and has been at UMMC for the past five years, while the state’s only burn center has been housed at Merit.
Furthermore, the survey also says that as burn center director, Arnold did not perform some of the required job duties, including creating policies and protocols for the burn care system and cooperating with trauma care for patient treatment.
At the time of the report, Arnold was not current in Advanced Burn Life Support (ABLS), the standard training for burn patient providers. He was scheduled to undergo this training in April, but UMMC refused to answer questions about whether that training took place.
The health system’s initial application also showed that none of its staffers were ABLS trained, though a Facebook post from May on the University of Mississippi’s Air Care page showed that 48 clinicians and communication specialists had undergone ABLS training.
Additionally, UMMC staff likely attended ABLS training at the Mississippi Trauma Symposium in May in Biloxi.
Arnold said in May at a presentation about the burn center that one of his goals moving forward was to acquire American Burn Association verification for the center.
“We’re designing everything we’re doing to meet the goals of ABA verification,” he said. “It takes two years after you’re established before they’ll come. And so I think, you know, this is obviously a work in progress, but eyes on the prize.”
During this year’s session, the state health department was given $4 million by the Legislature to choose the state’s next burn center. Nothing in the law prevents the $4 million from going to more than one hospital.
Baptist has also submitted an application to host the state’s next burn center, which includes its burn center director’s qualifications to lead the unit, two ABLS-trained staffers and an internal burn education plan. Its site visit has been scheduled for July 18.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Early voting proposal killed on last day of Mississippi legislative session
Mississippi will remain one of only three states without no-excuse early voting or no-excuse absentee voting.
Senate leaders, on the last day of their regular 2025 session, decided not to send a bill to Gov. Tate Reeves that would have expanded pre-Election Day voting options. The governor has been vocally opposed to early voting in Mississippi, and would likely have vetoed the measure.
The House and Senate this week overwhelmingly voted for legislation that established a watered-down version of early voting. The proposal would have required voters to go to a circuit clerk’s office and verify their identity with a photo ID.
The proposal also listed broad excuses that would have allowed many voters an opportunity to cast early ballots.
The measure passed the House unanimously and the Senate approved it 42-7. However, Sen. Jeff Tate, a Republican from Meridian who strongly opposes early voting, held the bill on a procedural motion.
Senate Elections Chairman Jeremy England chose not to dispose of Tate’s motion on Thursday morning, the last day the Senate was in session. This killed the bill and prevented it from going to the governor.
England, a Republican from Vancleave, told reporters he decided to kill the legislation because he believed some of its language needed tweaking.
The other reality is that Republican Gov. Tate Reeves strongly opposes early voting proposals and even attacked England on social media for advancing the proposal out of the Senate chamber.
England said he received word “through some sources” that Reeves would veto the measure.
“I’m not done working on it, though,” England said.
Although Mississippi does not have no-excuse early voting or no-excuse absentee voting, it does have absentee voting.
To vote by absentee, a voter must meet one of around a dozen legal excuses, such as temporarily living outside of their county or being over 65. Mississippi law doesn’t allow people to vote by absentee purely out of convenience or choice.
Several conservative states, such as Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Florida, have an in-person early voting system. The Republican National Committee in 2023 urged Republican voters to cast an early ballot in states that have early voting procedures.
Yet some Republican leaders in Mississippi have ardently opposed early voting legislation over concerns that it undermines election security.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Mississippi Today
Mississippi Legislature approves DEI ban after heated debate
Mississippi lawmakers have reached an agreement to ban diversity, equity and inclusion programs and a list of “divisive concepts” from public schools across the state education system, following the lead of numerous other Republican-controlled states and President Donald Trump’s administration.
House and Senate lawmakers approved a compromise bill in votes on Tuesday and Wednesday. It will likely head to Republican Gov. Tate Reeves for his signature after it clears a procedural motion.
The agreement between the Republican-dominated chambers followed hours of heated debate in which Democrats, almost all of whom are Black, excoriated the legislation as a setback in the long struggle to make Mississippi a fairer place for minorities. They also said the bill could bog universities down with costly legal fights and erode academic freedom.
Democratic Rep. Bryant Clark, who seldom addresses the entire House chamber from the podium during debates, rose to speak out against the bill on Tuesday. He is the son of the late Robert Clark, the first Black Mississippian elected to the state Legislature since the 1800s and the first Black Mississippian to serve as speaker pro tempore and preside over the House chamber since Reconstruction.
“We are better than this, and all of you know that we don’t need this with Mississippi history,” Clark said. “We should be the ones that say, ‘listen, we may be from Mississippi, we may have a dark past, but you know what, we’re going to be the first to stand up this time and say there is nothing wrong with DEI.'”
Legislative Republicans argued that the measure — which will apply to all public schools from the K-12 level through universities — will elevate merit in education and remove a list of so-called “divisive concepts” from academic settings. More broadly, conservative critics of DEI say the programs divide people into categories of victims and oppressors and infuse left-wing ideology into campus life.
“We are a diverse state. Nowhere in here are we trying to wipe that out,” said Republican Sen. Tyler McCaughn, one of the bill’s authors. “We’re just trying to change the focus back to that of excellence.”
The House and Senate initially passed proposals that differed in who they would impact, what activities they would regulate and how they aim to reshape the inner workings of the state’s education system. Some House leaders wanted the bill to be “semi-vague” in its language and wanted to create a process for withholding state funds based on complaints that almost anyone could lodge. The Senate wanted to pair a DEI ban with a task force to study inefficiencies in the higher education system, a provision the upper chamber later agreed to scrap.
The concepts that will be rooted out from curricula include the idea that gender identity can be a “subjective sense of self, disconnected from biological reality.” The move reflects another effort to align with the Trump administration, which has declared via executive order that there are only two sexes.
The House and Senate disagreed on how to enforce the measure but ultimately settled on an agreement that would empower students, parents of minor students, faculty members and contractors to sue schools for violating the law.
People could only sue after they go through an internal campus review process and a 25-day period when schools could fix the alleged violation. Republican Rep. Joey Hood, one of the House negotiators, said that was a compromise between the chambers. The House wanted to make it possible for almost anyone to file lawsuits over the DEI ban, while Senate negotiators initially bristled at the idea of fast-tracking internal campus disputes to the legal system.
The House ultimately held firm in its position to create a private cause of action, or the right to sue, but it agreed to give schools the ability to conduct an investigative process and potentially resolve the alleged violation before letting people sue in chancery courts.
“You have to go through the administrative process,” said Republican Sen. Nicole Boyd, one of the bill’s lead authors. “Because the whole idea is that, if there is a violation, the school needs to cure the violation. That’s what the purpose is. It’s not to create litigation, it’s to cure violations.”
If people disagree with the findings from that process, they could also ask the attorney general’s office to sue on their behalf.
Under the new law, Mississippi could withhold state funds from schools that don’t comply. Schools would be required to compile reports on all complaints filed in response to the new law.
Trump promised in his 2024 campaign to eliminate DEI in the federal government. One of the first executive orders he signed did that. Some Mississippi lawmakers introduced bills in the 2024 session to restrict DEI, but the proposals never made it out of committee. With the national headwinds at their backs and several other laws in Republican-led states to use as models, Mississippi lawmakers made plans to introduce anti-DEI legislation.
The policy debate also unfolded amid the early stages of a potential Republican primary matchup in the 2027 governor’s race between State Auditor Shad White and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann. White, who has been one of the state’s loudest advocates for banning DEI, had branded Hosemann in the months before the 2025 session “DEI Delbert,” claiming the Senate leader has stood in the way of DEI restrictions passing the Legislature.
During the first Senate floor debate over the chamber’s DEI legislation during this year’s legislative session, Hosemann seemed to be conscious of these political attacks. He walked over to staff members and asked how many people were watching the debate live on YouTube.
As the DEI debate cleared one of its final hurdles Wednesday afternoon, the House and Senate remained at loggerheads over the state budget amid Republican infighting. It appeared likely the Legislature would end its session Wednesday or Thursday without passing a $7 billion budget to fund state agencies, potentially threatening a government shutdown.
“It is my understanding that we don’t have a budget and will likely leave here without a budget. But this piece of legislation …which I don’t think remedies any of Mississippi’s issues, this has become one of the top priorities that we had to get done,” said Democratic Sen. Rod Hickman. “I just want to say, if we put that much work into everything else we did, Mississippi might be a much better place.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
House gives Senate 5 p.m. deadline to come to table, or legislative session ends with no state budget
The House on Wednesday attempted one final time to revive negotiations between it and the Senate over passing a state budget.
Otherwise, the two Republican-led chambers will likely end their session without funding government services for the next fiscal year and potentially jeopardize state agencies.
The House on Wednesday unanimously passed a measure to extend the legislative session and revive budget bills that had died on legislative deadlines last weekend.
House Speaker Jason White said he did not have any prior commitment that the Senate would agree to the proposal, but he wanted to extend one last offer to pass the budget. White, a Republican from West, said if he did not hear from the Senate by 5 p.m. on Wednesday, his chamber would end its regular session.
“The ball is in their court,” White said of the Senate. “Every indication has been that they would not agree to extend the deadlines for purposes of doing the budget. I don’t know why that is. We did it last year, and we’ve done it most years.”
But it did not appear likely Wednesday afternoon that the Senate would comply.
The Mississippi Legislature has not left Jackson without setting at least most of the state budget since 2009, when then Gov. Haley Barbour had to force them back to set one to avoid a government shutdown.
The House measure to extend the session is now before the Senate for consideration. To pass, it would require a two-thirds majority vote of senators. But that might prove impossible. Numerous senators on both sides of the aisle vowed to vote against extending the current session, and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann who oversees the chamber said such an extension likely couldn’t pass.
Senate leadership seemed surprised at the news that the House passed the resolution to negotiate a budget, and several senators earlier on Wednesday made passing references to ending the session without passing a budget.
“We’ll look at it after it passes the full House,” Senate President Pro Tempore Dean Kirby said.
The House and Senate, each having a Republican supermajority, have fought over many issues since the legislative session began early January.
But the battle over a tax overhaul plan, including elimination of the state individual income tax, appeared to cause a major rift. Lawmakers did pass a tax overhaul, which the governor has signed into law, but Senate leaders cried foul over how it passed, with the House seizing on typos in the Senate’s proposal that accidentally resembled the House’s more aggressive elimination plan.
The Senate had urged caution in eliminating the income tax, and had economic growth triggers that would have likely phased in the elimination over many years. But the typos essentially negated the triggers, and the House and governor ran with it.
The two chambers have also recently fought over the budget. White said he communicated directly with Senate leaders that the House would stand firm on not passing a budget late in the session.
But Senate leaders said they had trouble getting the House to meet with them to haggle out the final budget.
On the normally scheduled “conference weekend” with a deadline to agree to a budget last Saturday, the House did not show, taking the weekend off. This angered Hosemann and the Senate. All the budget bills died, requiring a vote to extend the session, or the governor forcing them into a special session.
If the Legislature ends its regular session without adopting a budget, the only option to fund state agencies before their budgets expire on June 30 is for Gov. Tate Reeves to call lawmakers back into a special session later.
“There really isn’t any other option (than the governor calling a special session),” Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann previously said.
If Reeves calls a special session, he gets to set the Legislature’s agenda. A special session call gives an otherwise constitutionally weak Mississippi governor more power over the Legislature.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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