Is there anyone out there who has experience or knowledge of the clinicals/rotations at WVSOM and or TCOM?
Ya, not so sure about that. Really the only people who were hurt by the closing of the hospital were the residents and employees. Students at TCOM were not directly affected because there is still JPS, Harris Methodist, Cook's Childrens, and many others in and around the metroplex. At my interview last month we were told that UNTHSC-TCOM bought the hospital from the state. What they will do with it, I do not know.
When I interviewed there, one of the interviewer told me that they now have an affiliation with county hospital. He told me that it will be a good opportunity for students to train there.
This is NOT TRUE!!!!! The closure of the osteopathic hospital was a terrible loss for the community, but may have been the best thing for our clinical education. The school did an excellent job preparing for the closure of the osteopathic hospital (it had been in financial trouble for a while and no one was really surprised when it closed). Our primary clinical site is now JPS (= John Peter Smith - the county hospital). County hospital = great pathology. This arrangement DOUBLED the size of our clinical faculty making it twice as large as ANY OTHER DO SCHOOL.
The old hospital was purchased by the school. While formal plans have not been announced, we know that it will be demolished. State law prohibits a school from owning a hospital, but supposedly the VA wants a facility to be included. Additional facilities for the medical school are being planned and we are hearing rumors of a pharmacy school.
Agree completely. This same question went around last year when the hospital closed (a lot of people thought the school closed!). I said then, and I'll repeat it now: OMCT's closing was the best thing that could have happened for our school. We now do rotations at much larger facilities in the metroplex that we had only limited exposure to (or were not allowed to set foot in) before the hospital closed. We are now tightly integrated with the clinical faculty at JPS, providing the faculty for many of their medical departments and bringing many of them into the TCOM fold as clinical professors. We have greatly benefitted from shutting down OMCT.
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