OU College Of Medicine To Expand By Over 40% The Next 5 Years

The University of Oklahoma is expanding its medical school by more than 40% over the next five years. 

The school says the goal is to add more students to improve healthcare across the state. 

Admissions at OU College of Medicine will increase from 163 students to 232. 

“Just one part of what really should be a multi-primed approach to improving health outcomes for Oklahomans, is to grow the team, and I guess to use a sports analogy, through the farm system in this case,” said Dr. Ian Dunn, the executive dean. 

Dunn says Oklahoma ranks 48th in the country for the number of physicians per capita and half the students who graduate from OU Med stay and practice in the state. 

So, adding more younger doctors to the field will help Oklahomans. 

“We've got to make sure that wellspring to replace and eventually take the place of our senior counterparts is alive and well, and I think that this is one step in that direction,” Dunn said.

Dunn says it's also not just about adding more students into the classroom but changing up the curriculum to better benefit students. 

“We're also innovating the way that, even if we didn't expand the class size, that students learn, and we're moving the students into the clinical areas earlier than ever before in a typical four-year curriculum,” he said.

He says this is a bold vision, but he's excited about the impact it could have on the state. 

“That's what success looks like overall, is that we start to see an uptick in the health of our population in Oklahoma,” Dunn said.

The school is also adding two new departments to the College of Medicine, the Department of Emergency Medicine and the Department of Molecular Genetics and Genome Sciences.