The TCU/UNTHSC Medical School is on track to start accepting applications in Fall of 2018 with a unique curriculum to set them apart.

The school is currently submitting materials to gain accreditation and has begun bringing faculty on board. Dr. Stuart Flynn, the dean of the new school of medicine, says they plan to bring on around 700 faculty.

The new school includes a “unique curriculum that is very focused on the student and patient and maintaining the idealism, as well as educating the students for the future of healthcare,” Flynn said.

He added that they have now finished, “building their curriculum and are now populating it with objectives and materials in the like.”

Rather than doing the pre-clinical curriculum in the first two years, the medical school plans to finish this in the first year. Second-year students will work on more patient-focused training and patient-centric education.

Flynn said the reason behind this particular method of schooling is to give the students more time in ambulatory care with their preceptors, thus providing them individualized training. The students will also have a panel of patients during their second and third years, which ensures familiarity with each patient beyond their health care.

“We will maintain what they start medical school with, which is a very high level of empathy which traditionally disappears in medical school,” Flynn said. “Our kind of tagline is that we will train empathetic scholars.”

Joanna Piatek, a pre-medical student at the University of Colorado, said she plans to send her application in Fall of 2018 and has high hopes for the school.

“Everything I have heard about the new UNTHSC/TCU medical school sounds incredibly promising,” she said. “Opening a state of the art medical school definitely puts TCU on the map in the medical world.”

Flynn added that the new medical school will be “the first of its kind.”