In partnership with St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx, New York’s City College will be opening the Harlem-based CUNY School of Medicine in the fall of 2016, the first and only medical school in the CUNY’s 168-year history. The med school will be an expansion of City College’s Sophie Davis School of Biomedical Education which already offers a seven-year BS/MD program which, according to the recent CUNY news release, focuses on “recruiting underrepresented minorities into medicine, increasing medical care in historically underserved communities, and boosting the number of primary care physicians.”
The CUNY School of Medicine will have the same mission – to train physicians with diverse backgrounds to work in underserved communities, particularly those in close proximity to City College and around New York State.
Maurizio Trevisan, City College Provost, explains that “in doing so, the school remains true to the mission of City College founder Townsend Harris, who stated, ‘… Let the children of the rich and the poor take their seats together and know of no distinction….’ ”
According to Capital New York, the inaugural class will consist of about 70 students.
Two additional medical schools are also in the process of becoming accredited and joining the AAMC: California Northstate University College of Medicine in Elk Grove, California and the University of Texas at Austin Dell Medical School in Austin, Texas. According to an AAMC article, the first will focus on training primary care physicians and the latter on “leadership, interprofessional, and transdisciplinary education as part of a research-intensive health system.” The AAMC article mentions the CUNY School of Medicine as the third to join the record 144 accredited medical schools in the U.S., stating that it will emphasize “commitment to increasing diversity in medical education…[and] concentrate on primary care training.”
Darrell G. Kirch, AAMC President and CEO, says: “At a time when the nation faces a doctor shortage, these schools and their diverse missions will help ensure greater access to care for a growing, aging population. We look forward to the outstanding contributions that will be made by the excellent physicians who train at these and all of our medical school programs. The nation’s medical schools and teaching hospitals have committed to expanding medical student enrollment by 30 percent by 2019 to address the coming shortage. These new institutions are part of that effort. Now Congress must act to lift the cap on Medicare support for graduate medical education so that all new physicians can complete their residency training and serve their communities.”
Related Resources:
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• An Inside Look at The Medical School Journey [Podcast]