Date Published | Dec. 20, 2007

By Roger Strasser
Founding Dean
Northern Ontario School of Medicine

A couple of years ago, Dr. Dan Hunt, who was then NOSM Vice Dean, Academic Activities, was invited to attend a gathering of North American medical educators in Miami Beach. Specifically, he was invited to make a presentation about our new Medical School, only to discover, to his chagrin, that his talk had been scheduled for 8 a.m. on a Sunday morning!

“ I expected to find at most a few dozen bleary-eyed attendees on deck to hear my presentation,” he recalled with a smile. “So you can imagine my surprise when some 600 people, representing well over half of all the conference-goers, showed up to hear what we’re doing here in Northern Ontario.”

His experience was symptomatic of the intense interest and increasing recognition that NOSM is receiving from medical educators all over the world. Modern medicine is truly a global endeavour, and even though still in its infancy, NOSM is fast becoming a must-see location on the world map for medical educators.

Here are just a few examples of the national and international recognition that NOSM has received this year alone:

•In early October, a delegation from the medical school at Tromso, Norway, including Norway’s National Centre for Rural Medicine, spent several days visiting NOSM. Tromso is the world’s northernmost medical school owing to its location well north of the Arctic Circle, and Canada has long enjoyed a special relationship with the school.

When it was first established in 1969, the founders of Tromso Medical School visited McMaster School of Medicine in Hamilton, which was itself then a new, pioneering Faculty of Medicine.

A delegation from Northern Ontario in turn visited Tromso seeking guidance when NOSM was just a long-standing dream, and the Dean of the Tromso School attended a conference in Sudbury that presaged the establishment of NOSM.

The 18 members of the recent Tromso delegation arrived seeking assistance with a thorny problem: though the school has been an outstanding success in training physicians who remain in the northernmost parts of Norway, they nevertheless gravitate towards the larger centres and towns, leaving more remote, smaller communities in the north still under-serviced.

After they spent a day on one of NOSM’s main campuses, we elected to split them up and distribute them around the North, just as we do with our students, to smaller centres. The Norwegians concluded that NOSM’s inter-dependent community partnership model could be the very element that’s lacking in their pedagogical approach and one reason that their graduates opt to remain in larger urban centres in the north.

•In September at a NOSM Symposium broadcast around the world on the Internet, Sister Elizabeth Davis told our students, faculty and staff that “You are the leaders …you are helping to draw the new maps … for new realities” in modern medical education.

“Your way is the most noted, most advanced and most articulated,” Sister Davis said in reference to NOSM’s curriculum, our model for distributed community engaged learning and the School’s use of new technology to advance medical education.

Coming from no less an authority than Sister Davis, this is high praise indeed. She is president of the Medical Council of Canada, a board member of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada and a noted medical administrator.

•Yet another indication that the school’s innovative, distributed community engaged education and research programs are being recognized as world-leading came in November, when a delegation from the University of Sherbrooke Faculty of Medicine arrived for a visit.

“You have been able to implement in a relatively short period of time a school of medicine that puts in practice most of the recent and future trends of medical education for the 21st century. Lessons for our school and our curriculum are numerous,” wrote Dr. Paul Grand’Maison, Sherbrooke’s Vice Dean for Undergraduate Medical Education, at the conclusion of his visit.

•Finally, in mid-October, NOSM hosted a seminar led by Dr. Charles Boelen. A distinguished physician with a long history of association with such institutions as the World Health Organization and Harvard, Stanford and McGill universities, Dr. Boelen is considered to be the father of the social accountability concept of medical education.
NOSM is the first new medical school in Canada to open its doors under an outright social accountability mandate, meaning that we must be fully committed to the health and well-being of the communities we serve.

After learning about NOSM’s efforts to incorporate this mandate into virtually everything we do, Dr. Boelen said that he was “seeing for the first time concretely implemented ideas which I have talked about for years and years, particularly around the medical school focusing on making a difference to people’s health.”

I’m immensely proud of the staff, faculty and students here at NOSM and of the people of Northern Ontario for helping to make Canada’s first new medical school for the 21st century a place that is already garnering so much recognition on the global stage of medical education.

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