Valery Zaporozhan: Future heads of the Ministry of Health can use the experience of Odessa Medical University to reform medical education

The successful experience of Odessa National Medical University can be extended to every medical university in Ukraine. This was stated by Academician Valerii Zaporozhan, the chairman of the ONMedU Academic Council, in an article for Vesti.
Therefore, the university was the first in Ukraine to return university clinics that in Soviet times were transferred to communal ownership. Here undergraduate and postgraduate training of future doctors is carried out, innovations are developed and implemented; In addition to clinics, students develop practical skills in the simulation rooms. “Worldwide, students are not allowed to communicate with a patient until they have passed a practical skills test. This is what the student has to do in the training and innovation center. The simulator itself evaluates the student’s actions, brings his skills to automatism and then scores. Thus, we have managed to eliminate purely theoretical training and teaching subjectivity,” Valerii Zaporozhan highlights.
Odessa National Medical University was the first one in the country to start teaching in English in 1996. Every professor speaks English and is therefore integrated into the world scientific society. Every year, about 200 professors and students are trained attending congresses in leading clinical and scientific centers in Europe and the USA. Thanks to the built-in electronic library, students have unlimited access to the online resources of the world’s leading universities’ libraries.
Valerii Zaporozhan pointed out that many universities are following this path so the Ministry of Health has a ready case for reforming medical education in Ukraine. “Unfortunately, the past authorities considered all this unnecessary and even harmful. The university and powerful science schools were nearly destroyed. I believe the new team is capable of delivering quality change and uniting the whole medical and educational community around this goal, combining the best experience, not dividing the good and the bad. Odessa Medical University is ready to join this work, to share results and knowledge” added Valerii Zaporozhan.