Curriculum Overview
Curriculum Overview
A learner-centered, competency-based educational experience that is infused with best practices spanning all educational methods.
Our curriculum is designed to provide a medical education experience that succeeds through programmed innovation while optimizing outcomes, and that will help shape the future of healthcare through the skills of our future graduates. It is an exciting time to be at Western University of Health Sciences, College of Osteopathic Medicine of the Pacific.
Rationale
-emerging technologies
-a profound increase in the breadth of medical knowledge
-increasingly complex and continually changing healthcare system
-patient population that is likewise increasing in complexity
The College of Osteopathic Medicine of the Pacific (COMP) recently took on the challenge to re-engineer a dynamic, state of the art curriculum designed to help COMP students continue to meet the mission of the College, which is to become technically competent, caring and compassionate, culturally sensitive, service oriented, professional future osteopathic physicians who are prepared for graduate medical education and the journey of life-long learning, and who will continue to provide comprehensive, patient centered healthcare with the distinctive osteopathic philosophy throughout their future careers. Furthermore, COMP’s curriculum assures that its future graduates are prepared to become change agents, leaders of the profession, and to generally thrive in the emerging healthcare environment. From the vantage point of beginning with the end in mind, we launched what we felt was the ideal medical education design for the next generation of emerging osteopathic physicians. Starting with the existing legacy curriculum that was already an outstanding systems-based curriculum, we have re-sequenced and re-energized the curriculum into a dynamic innovative and integrated curriculum that would prepare osteopathic medical students for the future of healthcare. From its conception, our curriculum was designed to revolutionize healthcare education.
The curriculum is driven by the initiatives of innovation, integration, and collaboration by the faculty of the medical disciplines ranging from the basic sciences to the clinical sciences. We are unique from many other medical schools in that we often see the multidisciplinary faculty working and teaching side-by-side. This makes for a dynamic and fun educational process that encourages life-long learning and collaboration between student doctors and faculty. We were also eager to create an educational experience that creates a balance between the rigors of medical school education, wellness and humanism that are critical to the development of each student. The entire COMP faculty and the iMED subcommittee successfully completed the first two years of the new curriculum and with it, a learner-centered, competency-based educational experience that is infused with best practices spanning all educational methods.
ASSESSMENT
The timing and sequencing of the curriculum allows for both formative and summative assessments that occur at optimal intervals. The assessment methods are designed to prepare students for the licensure examination process and their future clinical practice. Additionally, the curriculum has been created in such a manner that allows us to assess and improve the educational process and student performance in real time.
Conference Weeks
Pre-Clinical Curriculum
