Date Published | Oct. 1, 2008

The Northern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM) has been extremely fortunate to attract participants from communities across Northern Ontario to assist in delivering our unique model of distributed medical education. In fact, the ongoing enthusiasm and participation of our many partners has been essential for the school’s success. Support has also been demonstrated through the commitment of hundreds of clinical faculty and staff, generous donations to student bursaries and volunteerism via our Local NOSM Groups at 12 Comprehensive Community Clerkship sites.

Thanks to the significant contribution of our many supporters, the school is now about to embark on an exciting year of milestones and accomplishments of which all Northern Ontario can be proud.

This academic year marks the first time that NOSM has had a full complement of learners; a combined total of 224 medical students are now studying in the four-year MD program. Hereafter, students will graduate from the undergraduate medical education program every year.

This year’s incoming class profile follows previous entry classes of students that mirror the cultural diversity of Northern Ontario. Of this year’s 58 students chosen from 1,892 applicants, 91 per cent come from Northern Ontario, 40 per cent are from rural and remote communities, five per cent are self-identified as Aboriginal, and 26 per cent are self-identified as Francophone. Consistent with standards of all medical schools, these students demonstrated academic capability by achieving a mean weighted grade point average (WGPA) of 3.67 on a four-point scale.

While these new students begin their education in a distributed community-engaged model of medical education, and begin living and learning in Northern communities, NOSM’s charter class members are preparing to graduate from the MD program next spring. For the first time in the history of Northern Ontario, physicians will graduate in the North. They are expected to have an affinity for the north and an understanding of Northern health challenges.

In addition to our first MD graduates, the first cohort of fully qualified physicians will graduate in the spring of 2009 from NOSM’s two-year, fully accredited Family Medicine Residents of the Canadian Shield (RoCS) program – the newest Family Medicine program in Canada. Building on previous successful programs in the northwest and the northeast, this program was developed to provide residency training with particular attention to the needs of the people and communities of Northern Ontario. Learners are based in primary residency sites in Sudbury, North Bay, Timmins, Sault Ste. Marie and Thunder Bay, and supported by clinical rotations throughout rural, remote, Aboriginal and Francophone communities. These physicians will choose to enter family practice or pursue further third-year enhanced skills training in fields like emergency medicine and anaesthesia. In fact, all six graduates of the first year of NOSM’s emergency medicine training are practising in Northern Ontario.

The Northern Ontario School of Medicine celebrated the beginning of this milestone year on August 22, 2008 when the first dietitian interns graduated from the Northern Ontario Dietetic Internship Program (NODIP). This comprehensive internship program provides opportunities for community-based learning as well as practice-based research. Based at one of four principal sites (Sudbury, Timmins, Sault Ste. Marie and Thunder Bay), the dietetic interns worked with, and learned from, preceptors in hospitals, health units, long term care facilities, and clinics in their base community and in rural, remote, Aboriginal and Francophone settings. As with medical students and residents, these new dietitians graduate with an appreciation for the unique health-care needs of Northerners, as well as for the cultural diversity of the region.

The upcoming academic year will follow with milestones of truly historic proportions as the Northern Ontario School of Medicine graduates its charter class of undergraduate medical students and first class of postgraduate residents. I enthusiastically invite you and all our community partners, physician-teachers, donors and many supporters to join the celebrations of all that we have achieved together.