2018 Annual Report
UQ-Ochsner Clinical School students at Ochsner Medical Center

The Ochsner Way:Educating Tomorrow’s
Healthcare Professionals

A commitment to training physicians and other healthcare professionals the “Ochsner way” has been part of our heritage since the very beginning. In fact, when the Ochsner Clinic was founded by Alton Ochsner, MD, and his physician partners in 1942, all of them were on the clinical faculty at Tulane Medical School. These physician leaders were passionate about their commitment to train the next generation of physicians. More than 75 years later, that is a responsibility that we continue to uphold, and Ochsner’s role in academics and research continues to grow in exciting new ways.

More than a decade ago, Ochsner began an educational partnership with Australia’s University of Queensland (UQ), one of the world’s premier medical schools that has been named a top 50 university in the world. The result of this partnership is the UQ-Ochsner Clinical School. The aim of the program is to allow students from the U.S. to benefit from a global educational experience, while receiving the clinical training they need to meet registration requirements to practice medicine in both the U.S. and Australia. To date, the program has graduated 444 medical students who have gone on to residencies with some of the nation’s most respected medical centers. Students from the 2017 graduating class achieved an impressive match to residency training positions of 95%. Some 23% of those graduates selected residency programs in the Ochsner system, and 37% will remain in Louisiana for residency training. Others were accepted at such prestigious programs as UCLA, Vanderbilt, Emory University, the University of Chicago and Dartmouth University.

78% growth
in accredited residency training
programs over the past
seven years

Just as we did at our inception in the World War II era, today we continue to recruit top talent and train more healthcare providers to shape the future of health and wellness in our region. Each year more than 288 medical residents and fellows work in 28 different Ochsner-sponsored Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) accredited residency training programs in our system’s hospitals. In just the past seven years we have grown our accredited programs by 78%, and our graduate medical education team is constantly evaluating the physician landscape and patient health needs. This approach allows us to respond quickly with new training programs that enable us to provide better and more personalized care in the communities we serve. In 2018, for instance, we established a new fellowship in Multidisciplinary Pain Medicine, as well as one in Maternal Fetal Medicine. Ochsner also hosts more than 550 medical students, 150 advanced practice providers and 600 allied health students annually, providing over 4,200 student months of education.

As part of our new partnership in North Louisiana, we plan to assist the LSU Medical School in Shreveport expand its program to 150 students annually. Combined with the UQ-Ochsner Clinical School, this makes us the largest educators of physicians in Louisiana.