WVU School of Medicine Charleston Campus Welcomes Class of 2021

West Virginia University School of Medicine Charleston Campus welcomes its class of 2021.

Some 100 WVU faculty and 400 clinical faculty provide training and educational oversight to both student clerkships and to the CAMC residency programs. Each year, more than 80 third and fourth year students and more than 150 residents are on campus furthering their education. They join health care students in the disciplines of nursing and pharmacy who come through WVU Charleston to complete their clinical rotation requirements.

The WVU Charleston campus school of medicine includes the departments of behavioral medicine and psychiatry, family medicine, internal medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, pediatrics and surgery. Located on the Charleston Area Medical Center Memorial Hospital campus, strong clinical experience is provided at three hospitals within the CAMC system.

With a required rural health experience included in the curriculum, many graduates choose to make West Virginia their home and practice in the specialized field of rural medicine, helping to help meet our state’s pressing healthcare needs. Others join equally competitive residency and postdoctoral programs around the country. A WVU medical education can prepare the student for a challenging career in medicine, research and academia. Guided by our mission of transforming lives and eliminating health disparities, the WVU School of Medicine remains at the service of West Virginia and its people.Students come to our clinical campus from every county in West Virginia and represent every health science school in the state. These students take advantage of the training offered in this urban, tertiary, multi-specialty academic medical center.

Though its partnership with Charleston Area Medical Center as its teaching hospital, WVU Charleston educates over 500 students, researches in over 500 areas, hospitalizes over 40,000 patients, and treats over 200,000 outpatients. These services reach over 25 West Virginia counties on any given day.

The Health Sciences Center in Charleston is home to campuses of the West Virginia University schools of medicine, nursing and pharmacy. affiliation of the West Virginia University School of Medicine and Charleston Area Medical Center gives students the opportunity to train in a setting that has the advantages of an academic medical center blended with the diverse patient population of a large community hospital. The CAMC Health System is consistently recognized for quality health care and community outreach. One-third of WVU medical students complete their clinical rotations at Charleston Area Medical Center. They share the training experience with residents from other fully accredited residencies, interns from a fully accredited clinical psychology internship, as well as social work interns, nursing students, and other health sciences students.

The Charleston campus houses a fully staffed medical library with one of the largest clinical collections in West Virginia and a computer index to the national library of medicine. Aside from books, computers, and study rooms within the library, they also provide a great assortment of electronic journals, e-books, and databases such as PubMed and Cochrane. In affiliation with CAMC Institute, Charleston students and residents also benefit from a 7,000 square foot simulation lab featuring state-of-the-art sim man and sim baby simulators capable of a variety of crisis and assessment scenarios. CAMC Institute is the state’s only nationally accredited hospital-based provider of CME.

Our facilities are not only used by our own students and faculty, but by CAMC, visiting professors and the community to offer important health care education and services. On any one day there are as many as 15 different educational activities, 80 such activities a week; 300 individual subjects every month and over 4,000 group sessions held each year.

While the following programs are not under the purview of the Health Sciences leadership on the Charleston Campus, the WVU Building is also the location for WVU Eberly College’s school of social work graduate program, the West Virginia AHEC Program Office, and the state’s West Virginia Poison Center.

As one of the nation’s oldest regional medical education campuses, West Virginia University’s Charleston Campus is dedicated to educating caring health care professionals, providing research and offering services to improve the health of West Virginia citizens.

The Charleston Campus of the WVU Health Sciences Center was formed in 1972 as part of a federal rural health initiative in order to expand medical schools beyond the traditional campus. An affiliation with the newly formed Charleston Area Medical Center (CAMC) to direct CAMC residency programs was also established that year.

In 1977, the WVU Education Building at 3110 MacCorkle Avenue in Charleston was built, primarily through funding from The Sarah and Pauline Maier Foundation. In 1997 a rededication of the building was held in conjunction with the 25-year celebration of the Charleston Campus.

Opened in the Fall of 2008, the state of the art 175,000 square foot Robert C. Byrd Clinical Teaching Center at CAMC Memorial Hospital has further expanded and enhanced the WVU/CAMC educational system.

From young people exploring the possibilities of a health science career, to continuing education for professionals, to programs for seniors, the WVU Charleston Campus Health Sciences Center is in constant use as an educational and research facility and community outreach center.