Date Published | Sept. 20, 2007

All too often, medical schools have a reputation for elitism and exclusivity. But as we create Canada’s first new medical school in more than three decades, I hope we’re breaking down some of those negative stereotypes here at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine.

One of our most outstanding accomplishments to date is the development of a program geared towards all health professionals in Northern Ontario, not just doctors. I’m referring to NOSM’s Continuing Professional Education or CPE initiative.

Now entering its third year, NOSM’s CPE program has demonstrated truly phenomenal growth, and is already the largest program of its kind at any medical school in Canada.
During the 2006-2007 school year, NOSM conducted 225 CPE sessions geared to all 21 regulated health professions in Ontario. In all, 4,700 participants took part in a NOSM CPE event. The number of sessions more than doubled from the previous (inaugural) year, and the number has more than doubled yet again for the 2007-2008 calendar.
NOSM’s Northern Ontario Health Professional Development Calendar 2007-2008, which lists all of our CPE offerings, is a substantial document of more than 100 pages containing information on most of the 600 offerings that will be available this fall and winter.

The staff of NOSM’s Faculty Development Unit has assembled a database that currently contains the names of more than 3,000 health professionals in the North, each of whom should have received a hard copy of this year’s Calendar via Canada Post.
In addition, you can view the Calendar online at our website, www.normed.ca Just click on the box with the pine tree silhouette on the right hand column of your screen.
What sorts of subjects are covered under CPE? It’s an amazing variety: everything from Academic, Postgraduate and Clinical Rounds in a variety of disciplines to a course on Advanced Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) Applications for Health Providers.
Most of the courses are delivered using broadband Internet technology, video teleconferencing, traditional classroom lectures, interactive webcasting or some combination of all four. And most of the offerings are accredited in their respective professions by Ontario‘s health professional governing bodies.

Besides being absolutely free of charge for the most part, many of the sessions are archived electronically so that you can view them on your own computer, anywhere, any time.

For the moment, we’re concentrating on serving health professionals here in Northern Ontario, but it’s entirely possible that NOSM’s CPE programs will one day gain a global audience over the Internet, putting Northern Ontario on the map with health providers throughout the English speaking world.

Of course, such a robust program could only have been created through the hard work of the NOSM team. Former Interim Faculty Development Unit Directors Joyce Helmer and Dr. Sarah Strasser led the way, ably supported by Faculty Development Coordinators Suzanne Lortie-Caryle, Sherry Carlucci, Rita Campbell and Vin Auld.

I’m also delighted to welcome a new Associate Dean of Continuing Health and Professional Education to NOSM. Dr. Wayne Bruce comes to us from the University of North Dakota. He will be based at our West Campus at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay.

Credit must also go to the University of Toronto, which has helped with accreditation for our CPE offerings, and to the Northeastern Ontario Medical Education Corporation (NOMEC) and the Northwestern Ontario Medical Programme (NOMP), two institutions that pioneered medical education here in Northern Ontario.

So here’s to CPE at NOSM, the very embodiment of the things that make our school so special: using the newest technology to deliver the very latest in health knowledge to learners in the furthest reaches of Northern Ontario.

Roger Strasser
Dean
Northern Ontario School of Medicine