D.O.s Could Play Key Role in Bolstering Primary Care Workforce, Say Academy Leaders
By Barbara Bein
5/19/2009
Like many students graduating from the nation’s colleges of osteopathic medicine, Richard Gray has chosen family medicine as his specialty. In fact, Gray, an AAFP student member from Fort Worth, Texas, and other soon-to-be doctors of osteopathic medicine, are an important part of the primary care workforce, says an Academy physician workforce expert.
“Traditionally, the osteopathic medical schools have attracted a larger proportion of young people interested in family medicine,” Perry Pugno, M.D., M.P.H., director of the AAFP Division of Medical Education, told AAFP News Now.
OSTEOPATHIC SCHOOL ENROLLMENT SEES STEADY RISE
For the past several years, enrollment at the 25 member colleges of the American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine, (2-page PDF; About PDFs) or AACOM, has been growing steadily.
Last fall, first-time enrollment among osteopathic medical students reached 4,768, an increase of 360 students, or about 8 percent, compared with the enrolling class of fall 2007, according to Tom Levitan, AACOM’s vice president for research and applicant services.
Most of the increase stemmed from the opening of two new osteopathic medical colleges in Yakima, Wash., and Parker, Colo. AACOM is expecting even more students to enroll this fall, with the opening of three new satellite campuses in Pennsylvania and Michigan.
The first-year enrollment growth in the osteopathic medical colleges parallels that in U.S. allopathic medical schools, which enrolled a historic high of 18,036 students last fall, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges (6-page PDF; About PDFs)
PRIMARY CARE REMAINS CHOICE OF MANY OSTEOPATHIC GRADS
D.O.s have a long history of choosing primary care specialties, including family medicine, general internal medicine and general pediatrics, Levitan said. Even so, he noted, the results of annual AACOM surveys of graduating osteopathic medical students have shown a decline in self-reported interest in primary care from 40 percent of osteopathic graduates in 1999 to slightly less than 28 percent in 2007.
Interestingly, Levitan said, more osteopathic medical students opt for primary care specialties at the time they graduate than the number who said they planned to go into primary care when they entered school. For example, nearly 22 percent of students entering the nation’s colleges of osteopathic medicine in 2004 said they were interested in primary care. When those students graduated in 2008, slightly more than 29 percent chose primary care specialties.
According to the National Resident Matching Program, 45.1 percent of overall Match participants in 2008 chose residencies in family medicine, internal medicine (categorical) or pediatrics (categorical). By comparison, 55.3 percent of osteopathic medical students who participated in the 2008 Match chose one of those primary care specialties.
Levitan said he believes that osteopathic medical schools may provide a model for ways to produce more students interested in primary care careers.
Pugno agreed. For one thing, faculty at the osteopathic medical colleges who serve on admissions committees seem to seek students with characteristics that make them more likely to choose family medicine and primary care, such as coming from a rural background, he said. He noted that admissions policies are one component of the Academy’s overall strategy for attracting students interested in family medicine.
EXPOSURE TO PRIMARY CARE CAN GUIDE SPECIALTY CHOICE
Gray became a newly minted D.O. when he graduated May 16 from the Texas College of Osteopathic Medicine, or TCOM. In a few weeks, he will start his training in the St. Louis University/Scott Air Force Base family medicine residency in Belleville, Ill.
Gray said he learned about osteopathic principles as a physical therapy student at East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C. He worked full time as a physical therapist for eight years before entering TCOM in 2005.
During his first two years at TCOM, Gray said he was exposed to primary care repeatedly in the classroom, the clinic and the hospital. He did a preceptorship with a family physician in Fort Worth who still delivers babies. He also did a rural rotation with a group of four family physicians — three M.D.s and one D.O. — in the town of Littlefield in West Texas where he observed them practicing the full spectrum of family medicine.
“Excellent experiences with good family medicine preceptors throughout my four years at TCOM sparked my interest in the specialty. I believe that a family medicine residency will help me become the kind of physician I have always wanted to be,” Gray said. About 45 percent of the 128 students in his graduating class plan to go into primary care, he added.
Jason Dees, D.O., of New Albany, Miss., the new physician member of the AAFP Board of Directors, graduated from the West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine, or WVSOM, in Lewisburg and did his family medicine residency at The Medical Center in Columbus, Ga.
Dees said he considered becoming a surgeon, but chose family medicine as his career after his third year of medical school.
“WVSOM required every third-year student to do community-based family medicine as our first rotation,” he said. “As I saw the relationships that developed between doctor and patient, I was hooked. The focus on whole-person care was also very appealing to me.”
Pugno said both allopathic and osteopathic physicians are needed to meet the demand for more primary care health professionals in the coming years. ”We are partners with the American College of Osteopathic Family Physicians and other osteopathic physicians’ groups in our endeavors to make a difference in American health care,” he said.
This message is from Jayme Bograd from AMCAS Applicant Services to assist applicants with their AMCAS who have completed Study Abroad coursework.
“An advisor suggested that now would be a good time to re-circulate the common study abroad scenarios so you will find them below. Please feel free to have your advisee’s contact AMCAS directly at (202) 828-0607 during the hours of 9-7 ET weekdays if they want to walk through their scenarios directly with a representative as we know this part can be tricky for applicants.
Three common scenarios for study abroad programs:
- Programs sponsored by a U.S. or Canadian Institution
- Programs not sponsored by a U.S. or Canadian Institution, but for which credits were transferred to a U.S. or Canadian Institution
- Programs not sponsored by a U.S. or Canadian Institution, and for which credits were not transferred to a U.S. or Canadian Institution
1. If the program was sponsored by a U.S. or Canadian Institution, the applicant should:
- List the U.S. or Canadian Institution sponsoring the study abroad program, and on whose official transcript the coursework will appear
- Applicant should have the sponsoring institution send an official transcript to AMCAS
2. If the program was not sponsored by a U.S. or Canadian Institution, but the credits were transferred to a U.S. or Canadian Institution, the applicant should:
- List the U.S. or Canadian Institution that the credit will be transferred to
- List the foreign school under the “schools attended” section of the application
- Indicate that AMCAS does not require a transcript
- Select an exception reason of “Foreign College - Independent attendance - credits transferred to a U.S. or Canadian institution.
- Indicate that credit was transferred to another institution
- Select from the pre-populated drop down menu the U.S. or Canadian Institution sponsoring the study abroad program
- Enter all required course data under the name of the foreign school, but as it appears on the transcript on which the transferred credits appear.
Applicant should have U.S. or Canadian institution in which the credit was transferred to send an official transcript to AMCAS
3. If the program was not sponsored by a U.S. or Canadian Institution, and the credits were not transferred to a U.S. or Canadian Institution, the applicant should:
- List the foreign school under the “schools attended” section of the application
- Indicate that AMCAS does not require a transcript
- Select an exception reason of “Foreign College - Independent attendance - no credits transferred to a U.S. or Canadian institution.”
- Indicate that credit was not transferred to another institution
- Enter all required course data, except credit hours attempted, as taken at the foreign school.
The 2010 AMCAS application will open on or about Tuesday, May 5 and submission will begin on or about Tuesday, June 2. Applicants can begin submitting transcripts and letter information once they initiate a 2010 application. Letters will need to be received with the Letter Request Form if mailed or the Letter ID found on the Letter Request Form if electronic*.
*Note: UB will send the all letters electronically for those MD schools that accept this type of transmission.
Students can find an abundance of resources for the 2010 application including FAQ’s, participating Letters and Criminal Background Check schools by following the link.
Jayme Bograd
Applicant and Advisor Relations
AMCAS
The Medical School Admission Requirements for US and Canadian MD schools (MSAR) is now available. Please go to the website for ordering information. This is your authoritative guide to these schools.
Family-Medicine Residencies Shrink Again as Doctors-to-Be Get Assignments
By KATHERINE MANGAN
Record numbers of medical-school seniors ripped open envelopes on Thursday in ceremonies across the country and learned where they will spend the next three to seven years training as physicians. While the numbers were heartening to educators worried about future physician shortages, they also revealed a disappointing drop in family-medicine residencies, which have declined for nine out of the last 10 years.
The assignments were revealed at 1 p.m. Eastern time in simultaneous Match Day ceremonies at medical schools across the United States.
After a slight uptick last year, the number of positions offered in family medicine declined this year. The number of those positions filled by seniors in traditional American medical schools also dipped, by 8 percent. U.S. medical seniors filled just 46 percent of the 2,311 slots, while the remaining positions went mostly to graduates of foreign medical or osteopathic schools.
This decline prompted a statement of concern from the president of the American Academy of Family Physicians, Ted Epperly.
“If America’s medical schools continue to generate a physician work force that is going into subspecialties, we are not meeting the needs of America’s communities,” he said. “America’s medical schools then become part of the problem and not part of the solution of meeting America’s work-force needs.”
In an interview on Thursday, Dr. Epperly said the association “will redouble our efforts to drive home the message that we need to increase the work force of family physicians in this country.”
Many students, faced with debts of more than $150,000, are shying away from family medicine because of the field’s relatively low salaries, he and other educators concur. The most competitive specialties this year included dermatology, orthopedic surgery, and neurological surgery.
Rising Participation
Nearly 30,000 applicants participated in the match, which is an all-time high. Of those, 15,638 were seniors in American medical schools, 10,874 were graduates of international medical schools, and 2,015 were students and graduates of osteopathic schools. An additional 1,222 were physicians who had graduated from medical school earlier, but had not yet matched to residencies, sometimes because of illness or pregnancy.
“We saw an across-the-board increase in match applicants this year, particularly among U.S. medical-school seniors,” said Mona M. Signer, executive director of the National Resident Matching Program, which is sponsored by several groups, including the American Hospital Association, the American Medical Association, and the Association of American Medical Colleges.
“This is likely the result of medical-school expansion across the nation in anticipation of a future physician shortage,” she added. “Existing medical schools have increased their class sizes, and new medical schools are in development.”
The 29,890 applicants who participated in the match this year represented a 4-percent increase over last year and a 15-percent jump over five years ago.
Medical educators are concerned, though, that the number of residency slots remains constrained by the federal government’s cap on the number of positions that Medicare pays for. Ninety-three percent of U.S. medical-school seniors matched to a residency program this year, with 82 percent of them ending up with one of their top three choices.
New Orleans’s two medical schools had cause to celebrate this year. Tulane University School of Medicine filled all but three or four of its 200 positions, officials there said, and Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center filled 113 of its 117 openings. That’s a welcome change from 2006, the year after Hurricane Katrina, when both programs struggled to fill residency positions in the devastated city.
More Than One Kind of Match
The matching program uses a computer algorithm to match, as closely as possible, the choices entered by both applicants and the directors of teaching hospitals’ training programs.
For one medical-school senior, Match Day was especially memorable. Julie Contes, a senior at the University of South Florida College of Medicine, stepped forward when her name was called and opened her envelope as her parents and friends looked on. Instead of her placement, it contained a marriage proposal from her boyfriend, Johnny Gibbs, a medical resident in Fort Worth who had traveled to the ceremony to surprise her.
“I was crying and shaking, and I dropped the paper,” Ms. Contes said. Then, when he emerged from the crowd and got down on his knees, she said yes.
A few minutes later, she was handed another envelope, which informed her that she had been placed in a residency program at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. “It was the only anesthesiology position that would allow me to be near him, and it was my top choice,” she said. “What an unbelievable day.”
Medical Schools Should Re-Examine Admissions and Training Methods, Experts Say
By KATHERINE MANGAN
Medical schools should take advantage of the first major expansion in 30 years to update an outmoded physician-training model that has resulted in the wrong mix of people being trained in the wrong settings at too high a cost, according to a report released on Thursday by the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation.
The report, “Revisiting the Medical School Educational Mission at a Time of Expansion,” calls on medical schools to adopt sweeping changes in order to attract students of more diverse economic and ethnic backgrounds, train them in community settings as well as hospitals, and, in some cases, compress the time it takes to become a physician. (A summary of the report is available on the Macy foundation’s Web site.)
The report is based on the work of 36 educators who met at a three-day brainstorming session in October and a series of commissioned studies. Jordan J. Cohen, who was president of the Association of American Medical Colleges from 1994 to 2006, led the panel of educators.
Amid warnings of a looming shortage of physicians in the United States, nine new schools for training medical doctors are being built or planned, and 108 of the nation’s 126 traditional medical schools are expanding their class sizes. Some are also opening new branches (The Chronicle, January 12, 2007).
In addition, the number of osteopathic schools, which tend to graduate larger proportions of primary-care doctors than traditional medical schools do, has grown from 19 in 2000 to 28 today, with more in the works.
“We feel this is a unique moment in time—the first expansion of medical schools and medical-school enrollments in 30 years in this country, combined with the need and real possibility of health-care reform” under the Obama administration, said George E. Thibault, president of the foundation, which is in New York.
Dr. Cohen concurred. “The overarching message is that medical schools must accelerate the pace of change in order to meet the rapidly evolving needs of society.”
The staggering debt loads that doctors in training incur are scaring away many potential students, including minority-group members, and discouraging graduates from considering careers in primary-care medicine. The report notes that 80 percent of new physicians owe $130,000or more in student loans. One strategy the panel suggests is to follow the lead of some Canadian medical schools and examine ways to compress four years of medical education into three, possibly by combining the fourth year of medical school with the first year of residency training.
De-emphasizing standardized-test scores and looking at applicants more holistically could enable medical schools to diversify what is too often a predominantly white and affluent student body, the report notes.
Medical students and residents should also spend more time in a variety of practice settings, it says.
“Increasingly … much more medicine is being practiced outside the hospital, in clinics, doctors’ offices, and even in the home,” Dr. Cohen said. “We need to provide more opportunities for our students to practice in the real world, as well as the hospital.”
Founded in 1795, Union College, the first college to be chartered by the Board of Regents of the State of New York, is an independent liberal arts college. Its name reflects the sense of community felt by members of various groups instrumental in Union’s founding. Philosophy has been taught at Union sense it’s founding, and the college founded its bioethics program in 2001. Its new student-run medical ethics journal, Minerva medical Ethics, is named in honor of the Roman goddess of medicine and knowledge who symbolizes the college.
Call for Papers
To Union College’s new medical ethics journal, Minerva Medical Ethics
An undergraduate, peer-reviewed annual publication
Please email any submissions or questions to bioethics.union@gmail.com
Contributions from any realm of bioethics can take the form of essay, article, or short note
Guidelines
- MLA style citations using footnotes
- We ask papers be limited to 20-25 pages (though will not dismiss larger papers)
- Simultaneous submission is acceptable on condition of immediate notification of acceptance into another publication
- All submissions must be in standard Word format
- Please include your name, email and mailing address, and the institution with which you are affiliated.
Subject: FW: UF News: Future doctors share too much on Facebook, UF researchers say
Future doctors share too much on Facebook, UF researchers say
July 10, 2008
Media Contact: April Frawley Birdwell, afrawley@ufl.edu,
Writer: Tim Lockette, lockette@coe.ufl.edu,
GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Would it bother you to know that your physician smokes cigars and likes to do “keg stands”? That your gynecologist was a member of a group called “I Hate Medical School”? That your urologist is a fan of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”?
That is exactly the sort of information many people share on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. According to a new University of Florida study, many medical students are sharing far too much.
“College has traditionally been a time in life when non-normative behaviors are considered OK,” said Dr. Lindsay Acheson Thompson, an assistant professor of general pediatrics at UF’s College of Medicine. “I’m not sure I would want to have a permanent, public record of everything I did 10 years ago, but many of our students are creating just such a record, and they need to understand the problems this may cause.”
Thompson and several researchers from the UF’s colleges of Education and Medicine did a review of the Facebook sites of 362 UF medical students and residents and found that a significant portion of them were publicizing personal information most physicians would never share with their patients.
The study was published this week in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.
The researchers looked up more than 800 medical students by name on Facebook, finding that 44 percent of them (for a total of 362) had profiles on the social networking service. Only 37 percent of those students had made their Facebook entries private — the most obvious safeguard against revealing too much personal information on the Web.
The Facebooking students seemed to be aware of the personal safety issues inherent in social networking: only 6 percent revealed a home address. However, students were looser with lifestyle information including sexual orientation (revealed by more than half of Facebook-using students), relationship status (revealed by 58 percent of students) and political opinions or positions (revealed by half of students).
But the numbers tell only part of the story. The researchers randomly selected 10 Facebook profiles for a more in-depth analysis, looking for hard-to-quantify items that patients or colleagues might find objectionable. Seven of the 10 included photographs in which the subject was drinking alcohol, and some form of excessive or hazardous drinking was implied in as many as half of those photos.
Three of the 10 students in the sample had joined groups that could be interpreted as sexist (“Physicians looking for trophy wives in training”) or racially charged (“I should have gone to a blacker college”).
Facebook is full of bluster and trash talk, and college-age users may feel that these items are not to be taken seriously. Yet patients and future employers, the researchers say, may not have quite so strong a taste for irony.
“Doctors are held to a higher standard,” Thompson said. “There are stated codes of behavior that are pretty straightforward, and those standards encourage the development of a professional persona.”
The medical profession isn’t the only career that requires young people to develop a professional identity. The medical school study was modeled closely on an earlier study that looked at the Facebook use of future elementary-school teachers studying in a college of education. Generally, the education majors’ postings were relatively tame, but the study found that many future teachers shared information to an unsafe degree. For instance, almost half of those with public accounts posted their home address on Facebook.
Associate professor Kara Dawson — one of several College of Education researchers who worked on both studies — says the goal of this line of research is not to discourage Facebook use but to make students aware of the demands of a professional persona. There is some evidence that students do begin to understand the impact of Facebook as they approach graduation. The study found that while 64 percent of medical students had public Facebook accounts, only 12 percent of resident physicians did.
The researchers say they have ample anecdotal evidence to show that medical schools across the nation have a similar problem.
“When we presented this at the Pediatric Academic Societies in May, we were overwhelmed with requests from pediatric program directors who wanted to know how to get their students to be more careful on Facebook,” said co-author Erik Black, a doctoral student and fellow at the College of Education. “This is a global problem, and ours is one of the first studies to address the problem head-on.”
The researchers note that awareness of this problem is rapidly growing, and many UF medical students have cleaned up their online presence significantly in the 12 months since the data for the study were collected. The researchers would like to take this awareness a step further, encouraging students to use social networking sites to enhance their professional identity.
“Social networking is a powerful tool,” Dawson said. “Both teachers and doctors can use networking to their advantage — but they need to create sites that reflect their professional identity.”
By PAULINE W. CHEN, M.D.
Published: October 30, 2008
Not too long ago, I read a paper titled “Burnout and Suicidal Ideation Among U.S. Medical Students” in The Annals of Internal Medicine. It brought back a flood of memories.
Medical school was not easy for me. I knew that I wanted to become a doctor to help people, but I had given little thought to the process. I was poorly prepared for many things: the pressure to excel in ways that seemed so far from caring for people; rapidly mounting debts I signed off on every semester; a roller coaster existence from chronic lack of sleep; hazing from the more experienced students and residents; and the realities of patient suffering despite my best efforts.
Even surgical residency, despite the relentlessly long hours, seemed so much closer to what I wanted to do.
Some of my professors tried to “humanize” the process. They invited us to dinner in their homes, supported our extracurricular efforts to set up health screening clinics in low-income neighborhoods, and tried to make our basic science courses more relevant to working with patients. But sitting where I am now, as someone who teaches medical students and who loves helping others as a doctor, I can understand the challenge they faced. Given the fire hose of information medical students must learn in just four years, how does one ever gently take a sip?
Despite my teachers’ efforts, I was about as miserable in medical school as I had ever been. I felt alone. Neither I nor my classmates could admit to failure, and the last thing I wanted to do was to let anyone but my closest friends know just how unhappy I was. Success in medical school was the first step to a future of helping others, and I was not about to jeopardize that.
Last week I had dinner with two former classmates from that time. We had not seen each other in over a decade, and after catching up on personal news and reminiscing about gross anatomy lab and our first nights on call, one of them said quietly, “I hated med school. I wanted to quit.” The elephant in our collective memories had broken free.
With that elephant now running loose, and the three of us more comfortable with our own professional accomplishments, the conversation grew more honest. “If you look over my entire lifetime,” my other friend said, “those four years were the lowest point in terms of self esteem.” He held his hand out in the air, plotting an imaginary line that dropped precipitously to his knees.
It took nearly 20 years for the three of us to learn that we had each been miserable as medical students. It has taken even longer for researchers to discover the extent to which such feelings exist among American medical students.
In 2006, Dr. Liselotte N. Dyrbye and her colleagues at the Mayo Clinic found that nearly half of the 545 medical students they surveyed suffered from burnout, which they defined as professional distress in three domains: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and low sense of personal accomplishment. Moreover, the researchers found that each successive year of schooling increased the chances students would experience burnout, despite the fact that they had entered medical school with mental health profiles similar to those of their peers who chose other career paths.
More recently, in the paper on burnout that had first caught my eye, Dr. Dyrbyre and her colleagues widened the scope of their research, analyzing survey responses from 2,248 medical students at seven medical schools across the country. Again, nearly half of the students surveyed met the criteria for burnout. But the investigators discovered an even more ominous finding: 11 percent of all the students surveyed also reported having suicidal thoughts in the past year.
Dr. Dyrbye notes that we are just starting to learn about the high levels of distress in medical students. “It’s incredibly disconcerting,” she said. “What are the causes? And what can we do as educators to facilitate their well-being? We need a better understanding of the causes of stress to design interventions that will help improve student wellness. Students, just like doctors, need to take care of themselves in order to take care of their patients.”
Medical schools have more recently recognized the importance of this issue. For example, the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, the accrediting authority for medical schools in the United States, now mandates that all schools have a program for student wellness in place that includes “an effective system of personal counseling for its students.”
But beyond the personal implications, what are the ramifications of medical student burnout for patients?
In a third study, Dr. Dyrbye found that when tested for empathy, medical students at baseline generally scored higher than their nonmedical peers. But, as medical students experienced more burnout, there was a corresponding drop in the level of empathy toward patients.
“What do they really need to know before graduating from medical school, and how could they most efficiently learn?” Dr. Drybye asked, reflecting on one of the central challenges of medical education. “All the information we want to share with them is not necessarily what they really need to learn.”
By the time my dinner with my former classmates last week had ended, we had made plans to stay in touch and to do something I had never been sure I would ever do: return to my medical school in two years’ time to celebrate our 20th reunion. Over the course of our dinner conversation I felt strangely connected and nostalgic about medical school; I was deeply moved by what my two classmates had chosen to do with their education. One is a well-loved community obstetrician/gynecologist; the other is a psychiatrist devoted to teaching, working in a county medical clinic and caring for severely traumatized Hmong refugees. And both love their work as doctors.
As I listened to them talk about their work, I was reminded of one other thing Dr. Dyrbye had told me. “We need to change things,” she had said, “because maybe the students who are most vulnerable are the ones who are most empathic.”
The School of Medicine of the University of Queensland, Australia, has joined with Ochsner Health System in New Orleans, Louisiana, to create a medical education program for qualified students leading to the practice of medicine in the U.S.
Please note the accreditation review status at the end of this posting.
Applicants must have achieved a solid GPA and 8/8/M/8 minimum MCAT score. Admitted U.S. students will study two years of preclinicals at The University of Queensland School of Medicine. They will then spend two years in New Orleans, Louisiana at Ochsner Health System, completing their clinical education. Upon satisfactory completion of the four years, students will be eligible for ECFMG certification, to take the USMLEs, the NRMP match, and, subject to meeting other state and federal criteria, eligible for licensure and to practice medicine in the U.S.
The University of Queensland was founded in 1936 and it is renowned globally as an award-winning research institution of excellence and rigor. The standards of the accreditor of Australian medical schools, the Australian Medical Council (AMC), are held by the U.S. Department of Education as comparable to the accreditation standards for U.S. medical schools.
The Ochsner Health System has a nationally recognized forward-looking clinical delivery system, anticipating the medical needs of the future. Ochsner is highly regarded for the quality of its patient care, clinical services and as an independent Academic Medical Center. At Ochsner students will have the distinct advantage of a well supervised and cohesive clinical experience.
To learn more about the program, please click on the link forth website (above) or call 1-877-777-0155.
If you feel are a qualified candidate, please go to the program website, or feel free to contact U.S. representatives:
Admissions
International Pathways
163 William St.
New York, N.Y. 10038
1-877-777-0155
admissions@mededpath.org
Sincerely,
Professor David Wilkinson, University of Queensland,
Head of School of the University of Queensland School of Medicine
Dr. William Pinsky, Ochsner Health Systems, Chief Academic Officer
Important Message Regarding Accreditation:
This M.B.B.S. program (with 2 years of pre-clinical education at University of Queensland in Australia and 2 years of clinical instruction at Ochsner in Louisiana) (the Program) is subject to approval by the Australian Medical Council (AMC). The University of Queensland has submitted to the AMC an application for accreditation of the Program. Until the AMC completes its review of the Program, Queensland will accept students eligible for the Program into Queensland’s four-year M.B.B.S. program in Australia. In the event that the AMC does not timely accredit the Program, students who enroll will be expected to complete their four-year medical education at University of Queensland in Brisbane.
