Dr Stella Major (right) teaching WCM-Q students essential physicianship skills in the college’s state-of-the-art Clinical Skills Center.
Weill Cornell Medicine–Qatar (WCM-Q) has revised and upgraded its four-year Medical Program, bringing it into line with the curriculum taught at the home campus in New York.
The new highly integrated medical curriculum that stands among the most rigorous and progressive available anywhere in the world, said Dr Javaid Sheikh, Dean of WCM-Q.
“The new curriculum has been carefully designed to produce tech-savvy, inquisitive and adaptive physicians who are able to assimilate new knowledge, engage in research and acquire new skills throughout their careers so that their patients benefit from advances in medicine as they occur. In short, it is a curriculum designed to produce world-class, 21st century physicians right here in Qatar,” said Dr Sheikh.
The new curriculum is now being taught for the first time to WCM-Q’s most recent cohort of students, the Class of 2020, who began the WCM-Q four-year Medical Program in September 2016. The new programme of study is the result of four years of painstaking review and consultation, which began at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York and was later applied in Qatar.
Dr Thurayya Arayssi, Senior Associate Dean for Medical Education and Continuing Professional Development, said, “The previous curriculum gave us an excellent model to adapt, so our aim was preserve the best of it, adapt and revise parts we felt needed to be updated, and introduce new material and teaching methodologies based on the latest research. This work was begun and led by our colleagues in New York and we then adapted it for our local needs; the new curriculum therefore brings the most up-to-date approaches to medical education available anywhere in the world to students in Qatar.”
The new curriculum gives students an earlier introduction to and increased focus on the development of Patient Care and Physicianship (PCP) skills, and makes increased use of hi-tech learning tools and Simulation-based Immersive Medicine (SIM) training in the college’s Clinical Skills Center, which is undergoing an extensive programme of expansion and modernisation. Other key features of the new curriculum include an enhanced level of integration between the three identified curriculum themes of Science, Patient Care and Physicianship, and the provision of a longitudinal research experience that starts from day one of the curriculum and concludes in the final year with an in-depth project conducted under the supervision of a faculty member. The curriculum follows that of WCM-Q’s home campus in New York, with certain adaptations to fit local circumstances and maximise the benefits of WCM-Q’s particular strengths, such as its highly favourable student to faculty ratio, well-developed biomedical research program and support from Qatar Foundation. Under the new curriculum, WCM-Q students will continue to gain crucial hands-on experience in clinical care at WCM-Q clinical affiliates Hamad Medical Corporation (HMC), Aspetar, the Primary Health Care Corporation and the Feto Maternal Centre. In addition, a new clinical rotation has been established with Sidra Medical and Research Center, which is now hosting WCM-Q students on the Obstetrics and Gynecology Clerkship.
