Community Based Clinical Campus (CBCC)

What is a Community-Based Clinical Campus (CBCC)?

A CBCC creates a learning and training environment at the level of the community. This is not a new idea but, a reflection of the changing attitudes within (and outside) of academic medicine. Academic training, service and (to a lesser degree) research have in the past decade established a trend of moving away from the “Ivory Tower” and into more intimate settings within communities. Many reasons exist for this change but, the overriding value in such a trend is to “bond” future physicians with communities and create opportunities for continuity and spectrum of care environments which simply, cannot exists in the traditional medical school. The opportunity presents itself within a CBCC structure to produce a “different type” of provider which more closely identifies with a community, mission and patient than will a traditionally trained healthcare professional. This site will provide health professional education to the region an will enable those students who wish to learn in this type of environment as well as enhance the potential for those students to stay and practice in the area.

The Eastern Division is charged with recruitment of young people from the panhandle into the health professions as part of the land grant mission to serve the residents of the state. We plan to work with middle schools through the introduction into the region of the Health Sciences and Technology Academy (HSTA). HSTA, as it is known in other regions of the state, works to identify and support middle school age youngsters and prepare them for careers in the health sciences. It has demonstrated good success to date and the HSC-ED will facilitate HSTA’s activities in our region. The highly successful Rural Health Education Program, which has provided experiences in rural health care to health professional students, will be our partner in this activity. These students will then come to the Eastern Division for their entire third and fourth year of medical school to learn medicine from those qualified community based physicians in the region, another unique and innovative approach. Students from all the West Virginia Medical schools can apply for the education experience through the Eastern Division. WVU students in this activity, making the HSC Eastern Division truly multi-institutional as well as multidisciplinary.