Western is a great school and so is AZCOM. AZCOM has affilliation with quite a few hospitals in Arizona and out. In essence, that means AZCOM has connections with those hospitals when it comes to putting students in there for rotations. However, we do not have a hospital that we can call oficially call ours like many other medical schools do. If I'm not mistaken, I believe Western likewise has only affiliations.
Let me give you guys an example of what I want to do. I'm from Hawaii. I want to do my third and fourth year in Hawaii. AZCOM has connections with University of Hawaii med program. UH's programs allow AZCOM students to rotate through their hospitals and training programs. Only a limited number are allowed at any given time. AZCOM can help to set that up for me should I choose this hospital/teaching facility based route. If for example, there are 20 or more people who want to rotate in Hawaii then obviously not all can rotate there. A few will get denied when it comes to the lottery system AZCOM holds for its second year.
Many hospitals, however, accept indvidual applications. If you want to apply and azcom has no connections, then you can do it independently. Almost all hospitals I can think of whether they be public, or private do it this way. There are some hospitals that have closed door policies. For example, OHSU only allows its own students to rotate in its system. Some hospitals may not even have a teaching program for third and fourth year students.
You can try to email the rotations office to see what kind of affilliation or connections they have in the future locations you are intereted in.
An added benefit about AZCOM is the preceptor based option. Instead of hospital based training, a student can base third and fourth year off a specific doc in a specific specialty. Doing this allows you hospital acess with specific hands on experience. For example, many third and fourth years asssit and scrub in on surgeries. One fourth year told me how he got to do a whole procedure on this ladies broken leg while the doc just talked him through it. If you stay in Arizona, AZCOM can assign you to docs. If you go out of AZ and want this preceptor based option then you need to set it up yourself. THis means, calling the doc, explaining what it entails, and getting approval from AZCOM etc.
Many third and fourth years have a mix of hospital base training and preceptor based training.
For the third year, only 6 months max can be spent outside of AZ. During your fourth year you can spend the whole year out of AZ if you want.
Hope this helps. There's a lot I still don't understand. I may not be 100 percent up on everything. By talking to third ad fourth years, however, I feel pretty good about the whole thing.
Sit tight, the program is good. TESADOC???
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