The British Virgin Islands will start training future doctors in July at the new Ponce Health Sciences University BVI School of Medicine, officials said Monday.
The medical degree program has already attracted more than 900 inquiries from prospective students and accepted 38, said Gino Natalicchio, Ponce Health Sciences University’s president. Two of the accepted students are British Virgin Islanders. The four-year school hopes to accept 50 students for its inaugural year, gradually expanding to 300 students.
The application deadline for the inaugural year is March 31.
BVI Premier Natalio Wheatley said similar medical schools in Grenada, Dominica, and elsewhere in the Caribbean had transformed both healthcare services and economies, as businesses adjacent and ancillary to the schools benefitted. Taxis, vehicle and home rental and sales, restaurants and bars, recreation spots, and more could receive a boost from the school, he said.
“If institutions in other fields and disciplines see the success of PHSU and decide to open campuses in the BVI, there will be even more economic activities and opportunities for the Virgin Islands to prosper,” Wheatley said.
“This medical school also puts the BVI on the path to diversify into edu-tourism,” he said. “Among the 50 students in the first cohort are persons from other countries who have grabbed the opportunity to study in one of the most beautiful vacation destinations in the world.”
Foreign students would also get a front-row seat to BVI culture, the premier said, noting the July 28 start date coincided with the height of the BVI Emancipation Festival.
“I hope the students will be able to concentrate at that time,” Wheatley said. “There’s nothing a young college student would love more than to head to the beach after a tiring day in class.”
Students’ visiting family and friends could bolster the BVI’s tourism economy, he said.
The university has sponsored full scholarships annually for two BVI belongers with bachelor’s degrees, Wheatley said. The four year in-person medical degree program would cost an estimated tuition of $60,000 a year.
The first two years of the program cover foundation topics of basic sciences and early clinical experiences, school officials said. The third and fourth years would be spent studying on the job at hospitals on the mainland or in Puerto Rico, working in pediatrics, internal medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, family medicine, psychiatry, and surgery.
“At least for the first two years, without having to pay the cost of travel and accommodation abroad, it is our hope that with the lower cost and convenience more Virgin Islanders will take up the opportunity to enter the field of medicine and to take up positions in our local healthcare institutions,” Wheatley said.
The school, located at Tortola’s H. Lavity Stoutt Community College, is the fourth campus opened by the Puerto Rico-based university — joining institutions in Ponce, San Juan, and St. Louis, Missouri. Laboratory equipment was on the way and there were plans to expand the campus offerings to meet the medical school’s needs, Wheatley said.
Natalicchio said the school was already considering how to partner with the community college’s existing nursing program but said it could be a few years before that happened.
Plans were in place for the BVI school since at least 2020, Wheatley said, but were slowed down by the COVID-19 pandemic. Another hurdle was securing housing for the students, he said.
With 45 years experience, Ponce Health Sciences University’s medical degree program is preliminarily accredited by the Accreditation Commission on Colleges of Medicine and fully accredited by Middle States Commission on Higher Education.
