The Faculty of Medicine’s distributed medical education program has won two national awards for innovation in medical education — the Ted Freedman Award and the COACH Best Innovation in Technology Award.
The awards acknowledge the technological foundation and provincial partnerships that enabled the first-of-its-kind distributed medical education program, which has gone on to become a model throughout North America. UBC’s Faculty of Medicine launched its distributed program in 2004 with a goal to increase the number of graduating physicians and address the shortage of rural doctors in British Columbia.
“UBC is the first medical school in North America to leverage highly integrated and scalable audio-visual and collaboration technologies as part of the core strategy for distributed medical education,” the organization stated.
Partnerships throughout the province are a key aspect of the distributed program’s success. The network includes UBC’s Vancouver campus as well as the University of Victoria and the University of Northern British Columbia. Next year, they will be joined by a fourth academic site – UBC’s Okanagan campus. In addition, over 20 hospitals in all six of the province’s health authorities are linked in. By 2015, the program will have graduated 1,750 medical doctors.
To date, 47 medical schools have visited UBC to learn from its example, and the program has been replicated to varying extents to connect medical campuses across North America.
For more information, visit http://www.med.ubc.ca/media/201012/Faculty_of_Medicine_wins_national_awards_for_technological_innovation.htm