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How do you compare Windsor's HCP program with UHSA and IUHS? I noticed there is a significant difference in physical requirement attendance.
Max. Although I am not one who favors the lack of “physical requirement attendance” I can appreciate that it is possible to design and implement a distance learning program for medicine.
What I saw at IUHS or UHSA was just not satisfactorily implemented. Also the concept of long distance Medicine is not yet generally accepted.
When I was at IUHS, even the physical program on the island was unsatisfactory, as it was conducted on the basis of 80 cases. We lectured each week around the information to fully understand these 80 cases, eg asthma, cystic fibrosis. And the students spent two mornings a week at the local hospital, where they were exposed to good UWI type teaching from the UWI trained doctors they met on the wards there.
I am sure that they learned from the hospital experience, and I am sure that with diligence the on island students appreciated the 80 cases.
However, there are MORE than 80 cases to know in Medicine. The students had long lists of links and pages to read from texts with little feed back/interaction from staff. I beleve that the education re the cases ought to have been additional lectures delivered by a panel of staff members as a means of integrating the several Basic Sciences. In fact in my stint at St Martinus, I actually got the students and some of the staff to put on a series of prersentations once a week after the normal days activities in which we covered the diseases of prostate gland, asthma, ovarian tumors etc.
The situation with the offshore students was ridiculous and most chaotic and disorganized, because a solitary eccentric man was conducting all of the eight online modules simultaneously all the time- an impossibility.
There are some who favor full training on campus and those who feel that Basic sciences can be done online. And this has been argued ad infinitum ad nauseam que on this forum for years. And the major point that must be grasped has been ignored because of bias by those who favor one or either of the two ways of doing it.
I will say this from the experiences I have seen. It is harder to run a long distance program successfully. It requires more staff members and better and more experienced staff, and takes a little more time to implement.
If you will get some green new graduate to teach a Basic Science subject who has no love or passion for teaching the subject you are failing the student. Unless that recent graduate is someone like those who did the extra year as an honors student in that subject (as occurs in some British programs) and one who can teach well, the student might as well study long distance. I have also seen the scenario, where subjects are offered out of order because the school did not have the proper number of staff members dedicated to or capable of teaching the subject. I have seen cases where PhD men teach the subject but cant relate it to medicine. I have seen the case where the PhD man teaching Behavioral science got his PhD from some guru school and did not know how to interpret the USMLE objectives, and had the students very loss!
I am saying that I have seen so much ** offered on campus in the name of on campus Basic Science teaching or exposure to unsuspecting medical students, that it is mind boggling. Hence, I no longer attack the horrors that I met when armed with my UWI degree and 2o plus years experience I landed in St Kitts to teach at IUHS. Many schools out there pretend to be going by the book and offering an American curriculum, but they might as well be doing the madness I saw on campus at IUHS in 2002.
On the other hand there are some who come on this forum saying school A B and C in the US have this subject online or does part of their program online. If you can accept that why cant you accept the IUHS or UHSA program.
One reason is these US schools are established and they have many staff members in each of the relevant departments. IUHS and UHSA have little or no staff. UHSA has visiting staff that is conscripted according to who is available at any point in time, and according to who answer the letters of request fastest.
I submit to the scoffers without fear of contradiction that the solitary chap who was running the 8 modules on the 80 cases at IUHS every week was doing the impossible. ON the other hand a US school with 10-20 physicians and researchers say in the Biochem Department, can easily among them set up a suitable Biochem program that can be done online…………….and with good result. I know it can be done, because I can see how I can personally deliver such a program complete with a suitable question bank on each topic or concept, that will enable me to see if the student has grasped the concept. I however CAN NOT do it for ALL the subjects in the curriculum. Nor could I run the Biochem program with all the other subjects concurrently.
I will discuss the UHSA and Windsor scenarios in other posts.
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