This story originally appeared in the February 21, 2003 edition of Outlook.

By Katie Fitzgerald

     In keeping with its commitment to educating primary care physicians for the Ohio, the College of Osteopathic Medicine continues to adapt to an ever-changing medical field.  In 1999 the school restructured the pre-existing Systems-Based (SB) curriculum and replaced it with the Clinical Presentation Continuum (CPC) curriculum.

     "One of the deficiencies of the traditional SB curriculum was the dearth of opportunities for students to develop skills that would enable them to become independent learners and to deliver healthcare effectively in the 21st century," said Peter Dane, D.O., associate dean for pre-doctoral studies.  "while the CPC remains faculty directed, it is structured to steer students away from dependence on faculty experts as their primary resources for factual information."

     While students in the CPC curriculum look to faculty experts for direction, they seek out information themselves and use that information to construct their individual knowledge bases.

     "As a result, they become experts at identifying and accessing alternate sources of information to help them solve diagnostic and therapeutic challenges they encounter in the clinical world," Dane said.

     In addition to the CPC curriculum, then school also offers a more student-directed curriculum developed in response to a new initiative proposed by Barbara Ross-Lee, dean of the college in 1993.

     "The purpose of the the new problem-based curriculum was to provide a vehicle to explore learning environments that could serve as alternatives to the lecture-based format of traditional medical school curricula," he said.

     "All students have different learning styles," Dane added.  "Offering an alternative to the traditional medical school environment has allowed OU-COM to attract and retain students whose learning style requires less of the the faculty direction than is usually characteristic of an institution of higher learning."

     All students who are accepted for admission to the College of Osteopathic Medicine are invited to apply for placement in the Patient Centered Continuum (PCC) curriculum.  Since its inception eight years ago, the average number of applicants per year has been between 25 and 35.

     "Since it is much more student-driven than the CPC curriculum, students selected for the PCC curriculum are those who demonstrate a strong desire for and success in a self-directed learning environment," Dane said.  "Students who prefer more explicit faculty direction find the environment of the CPC much more conducive to effective learning."

     Both programs are conducted on the Athens campus for the first two years and consist predominantly of classroom experiences, with weekly or biweekly half-day clinical experiences with health care practitioners.  The second two years of each curriculum take place in predominantly clinical environments of hospitals and office practices scattered throughout Ohio as part of the CORE (Centers for Osteopathic Research and Education) consortium.

Katie Fitzgerald is a student writer with University Communications and Marketing.