By the end of the month, students at the Virgin Islands’ first medical school will be living here and taking classes, officials said.
The Ponce Health Sciences School held a “White Coat Ceremony” to welcome the inaugural class to its new BVI School of Medicine last Thursday at the H. Lavity Stoutt Community College.
During the event, 32 of an expected 40 students received their coats and swore the Hippocratic Oath, according to the school.
The class includes two students from this territory, and the rest are from Puerto Rico and several states in the mainland United States, school officials said.
“This White Coat Ceremony not only welcomes our inaugural M.D. class in Tortola but also underscores the quality and rigour of our four-year Doctor of Medicine curriculum,” said PHSU President Gino Natalicchio.
Living on Tortola
The medical students will live on Tortola — most of them at the Social Security Board’s Joes Hill Manor Estate project — and attend classes and labs for the first two years of the four-year programme, according to school officials.
For the remaining two years, they will complete clinical rotations on one of the three affiliate PHSU campus in Puerto Rico or the mainland US.
Mr. Natalicchio explained previously that this arrangement is due to a “regulatory issue:” The accrediting bodies the school is using — the US-based Middle States Commission on Higher Education (MSCHE) and the Ireland-based Accreditation Commission on Colleges of Medicine (ACCM) — require students to complete two years of their education in the US or a US territory, he explained.
The Tortola medical school already has a provisional accreditation from ACCM — a body that accredits several medical schools in the Caribbean — as well as an accreditation from the MSCHE, according to the school.
Additionally, the school has a provisional licence from the Higher Education Licensing Board under the VI’s Ministry of Education, Youth Affairs and Sports, according to the school.
‘Opportunity’
Last Thursday, Premier Natalio “Sowande” Wheatley was among the government officials who attended the ceremony.
“Inaugurating this school of medicine is very significant because it is a long-desired opportunity to have graduate medical education in the BVI,” he said.
Other attendees included Health and Social Development Minister Vincent Wheatley; Education, Youth Affairs and Sports Minister Sharie De Castro; PHSU CEO David Lenihan; BVI School of Medicine Dean Anne Peterson; and BVI School of Medicine Vice President of Operations J. Daniel Perez.
First site outside US
The BVI School of Medicine, PHSU’s first site outside the US, will award graduate degrees in medicine, officials said.
PHSU’s main campus in Ponce, Puerto Rico, also awards degrees in clinical psychology, dental medicine, biomedical sciences, medical sciences, public health and nursing.
Overall, the PHSU campuses have an enrolment of 2,140 active students served by 625 faculty members, according to the school.
PHSU is owned and administered by Tiber Health, a St. Louis-based company.
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