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The next meeting of the AOA Commission on Osteopathic College Accreditation (COCA) will be held on Saturday, August 25, and Sunday, August 26, 2007, at the O'Hare Hilton Hotel in Chicago, IL. Review of accreditation activities will begin on August 25th at 9:00am (CDT).
Two initial provisional accreditation site visit reports will be reviewed: Rocky Vista University College of Osteopathic Medicine (Parker, CO); and, Pacific Northwest University of Health Sciences, College of Osteopathic Medicine (Yakima, WA). The COCA is expected to make a decision on whether to grant initial provisional accreditation to these two colleges.
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For more information about this meeting, including a request to present written third-party testimony, please contact the Secretary to the Commission: Konrad C. Miskowicz-Retz, PhD, CAE; Director, Department of Accreditation; American Osteopathic Association; 142 East Ontario Street; Chicago, IL 60611; phone 312.202.8048; fax 312.202.8202; e-mail [email protected].
However, isn't it more important and more of an outrage that the health care industry is really run by for-profit insurance companies?
My colleagues:
A group of students at one of our colleges has organized an online petition to COCA/AOA voicing disapproval of for-profit medical education and asking them to do the same. You can access the petition at: http://www.petitiononline.com/not4pro/
If you are interested, please take a moment to look this over and add your signature if you are in agreement.
George Mychaskiw II, DO, FAAP
You can bury your head in the sand and not worry about what is going on, but you may find yourself having spent a great deal of time and money to enter a defunct profession. The for-profit school has the potential to be used as a lever to end this profession. Alarmist? Maybe, but the stakes are too high not to be.
I'm sorry but I don't believe the creation of a for-profit school is that great of a lever. There are bigger levers that can be used to end the profession:
- The lower GPA and MCAT admission standards across the board for all DO schools compared to the lower tier MD schools.
- The consistently lower USMLE Step 1 pass rates of those DO students that choose to take it.
- The lack of enough osteopathic residencies for all DO graduates, and the lack of a geographically-diverse residency pool for DO graduates to choose from.
- The ever-decreasing number of osteopathic hospitals in the US.
Any of those above reasons could've been used to "end the profession." All the AMA and ACGME have to do is say that all residency programs that are ACGME accredited will no longer accept osteopathic applicants due to the above.
I hardly believe this single event will spell death for the profession. There are many for-profit allopathic schools operating a few miles away from the coast of Florida, and their graduates are enjoying quite a degree of success as physicians in the US. There are other things I worry about as a future osteopathic physician. Rocky Vista is not even on my "worry list."
Not an issue as long as osteopathic medicine graduates continue to practice medicine at the level of their allopathic counterparts with the same or lesser percentage of malpractice actions against them.
This same reply applies to future graduates of Rocky Vista, no?
i think you should really take a step back here and analyze this. yeah, a for-profit situation sounds pretty bad from the administrative and business level...but how different is that from a private practice? how different is that from a physician group? how different is that from some hospitals? every business venture is in some form "for profit".
you cant just stop people from doing this thing after millions of dollars have been put into it.
If the AOA says things are good, and the school is providing a quality education - what issue do you truly have? if they churn out sucky docs, well thats a problem to address. if they produce some of the finest competent physicians around, then its an invaluable venture.
we need to focus on bigger problems and quit worrying about all this.
SDN is like high school man...all this dang drama.
3) Post it on Youtube
This would prove the cause is serious and has clout.
Try to visualize how could such a campaign prove to be serious and/or have clout.
It's analogous to making a campaign to have 1000s of members of a given constituency contact their congress representative via letters, faxes, etc.
OK, I see your point.
Unfortunately the analogy doesn't quite work with the AOA, since apparently the AOA membership has little say in who the AOA leaders are. A congressman depends on the support of his/her constituents but the president of the AOA -unfortunately- has no such constraint (unfortunate for us, fortunate for him). Or at least the constraint is not that apparent since it seems that the AOA does things that sometimes go against what the majority of the AOA membership wants.
Although I don't agree with the obvious, I think some of you need to wake up and face the coffee pot. Almost all medical schools are for profit, despite their accounting catagorization. Just take a look at the numbers. If a school has 120 students per class with 4 classes in attendance and tuition of $25000 per year that is $20,000,000 dollars a year. Now if the school has 50 paid faculty members (that would be basicly 6-10 full time faculty in each of the major disciplines - and don't forget that the physicians teaching at a school usually dont count as full time faculty) each making $150,000 (and trust me they are not!) that would be a cost of about $12,000,000. That leaves $8,000,000 for those nasty electric and phone bills. Hmmmmm Looks like no profit at all!
Should we also ban any caribbean island grad from being allowed to participate in the match as well?
All of those programs are for-profit. What difference does it make? Their graduates have been practicing medicine in the United States for decades.
If Rocky Vista starts to compromise their instruction and produces underqualified students that can't pass their boards (extremely unlikely), they'll be penalized with a loss of accreditation. There you go.
On a personal note, I'm more annoyed at their unwillingness to mandate a nation-wide removal of osteopathic transitional years (Pennsylvania is a place that I'd really like to match in someday).
What exactly does match have to do with the COCA giving accreditation to this school?
...if we want to bring in their track record for passing boards, then that might be an issue. Even Osteopaths have an average of what, mid to upper 70% pass rate of USMLE, while the Caribbean schools have what? 58% in 2004.
I'm sorry, but tuition has become too high and we are hurting ourselves in the future if we continue to not only do nothing but encourage high tuition in the name of profit.
Isn't it the 5 states who maintain the DO osteopathic intern year?
Well, thats the bottom line, isn't it? What better way to determine the quality of a school than to evaluate their ability to produce quality physicians. Now the question is, does a school's for-profit status compromise their ability to produce quality physicians?.
And banning Rocky Vista would solve that how exactly?
But theoretically, having another medical school would foster lowering tuition in order to compete for 1st year entrants.
And those five states have been forced to pick from a smaller sample of osteopathic medical graduates as a result.