A Unique Approach

The Northern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM) is a pioneering faculty of medicine.  A medical school for the whole of Northern Ontario, the School is a joint initiative of Lakehead University and Laurentian University with main campuses in Thunder Bay and Sudbury, and multiple teaching and research sites distributed across Northern Ontario.  By educating skilled physicians and undertaking health research suited to community needs, NOSM will become a cornerstone of community health care and contribute to improving the health of people in Northern Ontario.

NOSM is unique in a number of ways.  When the School welcomed its first students in September 2005, it became the first new medical school in Canada in over 30 years, and only the second new medical school in North America during a similar period.  It is the first Canadian medical school hosted by two universities, some 1200 kilometers apart.  In addition, NOSM is the only Canadian medical school to be established as a stand-alone, not-for-profit corporation, with its own Board of Directors and corporate by-laws.

The first medical school in Canada to be opened during the Digital Age, NOSM’s four-year Undergraduate Medical Education e-curriculum emphasizes the use of broadband technology to bridge the distance between campuses, and to facilitate an extensive distributed learning model that is unique in modern medical education. 

NOSM is also the first Canadian medical school established with a social accountability mandate.  From its community-based Board of Directors to its extensive reliance on Northern communities to act as hosts for its students, NOSM is committed to engaging Northerners in the education process.  By the time the MD program is completed, the average NOSM student will have spent nearly forty per cent of his or her time studying in Aboriginal, small rural and larger urban Northern Ontario communities.

Grounded in the North 

A medical school like no other, Northern Ontario School of Medicine has a strong emphasis on the special features of Northern Ontario.  These include a diversity of cultures and geographical locations; varying illness, injury and health status patterns with their specific clinical challenges; a wide range of health service delivery models which emphasize supporting local health care and interdisciplinary teamwork; and the personal and professional challenges, rewards and satisfactions of medical practice in Northern and rural environments.

NOSM has a mandate to be socially accountable to the cultural diversity of the region it serves, including: Aboriginals, Francophones, remote communities, small rural towns, large rural communities and urban centres.  Evidence of this mandate can be found in the School’s curriculum, administrative structure, research program, student demographics, continuing professional education program, and more. 

In its student recruitment efforts, NOSM continues to follow its mandate of social accountability, and aims to have class profiles which reflect the cultural diversity of Northern Ontario.  Demographic profiles of the School’s incoming classes to date show that, of each incoming class of 56 students:

NOSM faculty, staff and students do not function in a traditional medical school building.  Rather, the School’s walls are the boundaries of Northern Ontario and at any given time an individual may be working at one of the School’s two campuses, or in a remote, rural or urban community.

The School has collaboration agreements with the North East and North West Local Health Integration Networks, and affiliation agreements with more than 70 health centres and hospitals across Northern Ontario.  These agreements secure NOSM’s relationship with hospitals and health service centres and allow students, faculty and staff to become immersed in the culturally diverse region they are serving.

Community participation is essential to the success of NOSM.  With students distributed across the North, communities play a vital role in welcoming and supporting students so they feel part of the community and develop a particular understanding of living and working in a rural or remote setting.

Education and Community-Based Placements 

Our innovative undergraduate MD program involves students learning in small groups, much of the time in distributed community-based learning sites supported by broadband communication information technology.  The curriculum is clinically driven, while ensuring students gain a strong grounding in core knowledge and skills including the basic sciences.

NOSM’s learning approach is patient-centered, focusing on people in their home, family, and community context, through case-based learning.  This Community-Based Medical Education program has students learning not only in larger hospitals, but also in smaller hospitals, health services, family practices and various community settings.

NOSM’S four year Undergraduate Medical Education (UME) program is designed to prepare students to enter the next level of medical education, namely the Post Graduate Education (PGE) program.  Both the UME and PGE programs are grounded in the six key academic principles adopted by NOSM.  These principles are interprofessional, integration, community-oriented, distributed community-engaged learning, generalism and diversity.  All six academic principles are reflected in the School’s social accountability mandate.

Extensive community-based educational assignments called Integrated Community Experiences (ICE) are an integral, and unique, element of the NOSM curriculum.  As such, NOSM “classrooms” are unique and often non-traditional.

At the end of Year One of the undergraduate program, students spend four weeks in a Northern Ontario Aboriginal community.  Second-year students complete two four-week assignments in small rural or remote communities at the beginning and end of term.  In Year Three, students spend the whole academic year off campus in one of twelve host communities across Northern Ontario completing a Comprehensive Community Clerkship (CCC).  Fourth-year students undertake specialty rotations and electives in the regional hospitals in Sudbury and Thunder Bay.

Five key themes are interwoven throughout the four-year NOSM MD program:

    • Northern and Rural Health
    • Personal and Professional Aspects of Medical Practice
    • Social and Population Health
    • Foundations of Medicine
    • Clinical and Communication Skills in Health Care

In 2006, the College of Family Physicians of Canada granted “new program status” to NOSM’s Family Medicine Residents of the Canadian Shield program (FM RoCS).  The first participants in the program began their residency on July 1, 2007.  The School’s FM RoCS program accepts 30 residents per year in the two-year program, where residents undertake clinical learning in Northern Ontario communities.  They undergo training that will prepare them for eventual practice in any community, but especially in rural and remote settings. 

NOSM’s residency training in Northern Ontario was pioneered by two successful predecessors: the Northwestern Ontario Medical Program (NOMP) on behalf of McMaster University, and the Northeastern Ontario Medical Education Corporation (NOMEC) associated with the University of Ottawa.  NOMP’s activities were integrated with NOSM in the fall of 2005, and NOMEC in the summer of 2006.  The transfer of programs and activities previously delivered by these two highly successful organizations has allowed for a substantial expansion in NOSM programming.  

The School’s goal is to graduate medical generalists who are innovative, resourceful, self-reliant, culturally and emotionally sensitive, and who are fully acquainted with the rigours and rewards of medical practice in Northern, remote and culturally diverse settings.