Curriculum

An Active Learning Approach

The LUCOM curriculum offers you an integrated systems-based model that emphasizes active learning. Highlighting biomedical and clinical interdisciplinary collaboration, our curriculum correlates basic scientific information and methodology with fundamental clinical application. This approach helps you develop a holistic and osteopathic approach to medicine.

Our curriculum combines the following:

Program Learning Outcomes

Programmatic emphasis on the osteopathic core competencies and spiritual care equips student-doctors to match into competitive graduate medical education programs and continue the tradition of providing holistic patient care.

LUCOM’s Program Learning Outcomes include the competencies of:

• Osteopathic Principles and Practice/Osteopathic Manipulative Treatment
• Medical Knowledge
• Patient Care
• Interpersonal and Communication Skills
• Professionalism
• Practice-based Learning and Improvement
• Systems-based Practice
• Spiritual Care

Additional information about the program learning outcomes for the Liberty University College of Osteopathic Medicine Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine program is available in the LUCOM Catalog.

Overview

First Year – OMS-I

OMS-I starts with an introductory foundations course during the first six weeks. This is then followed by a system-based look at normal structure and function, from the molecular level to the whole-person level, as well as general pathological processes that affect human health. You receive clinical exposure in your first year through simulation encounters and standardized patient encounters.

Second Year – OMS-II

During OMS-II, your clinical experience expands with an increased opportunity to interact with standardized patients and high-fidelity simulators on campus. A second pass through the system-organized courses places more emphasis on the pathological conditions common to humans that detract from human health.

Third Year – OMS-III

For the entirety of OMS-III, you are assigned to one of LUCOM’s Core Rotation Sites. This foundational clinical education ensures quality, consistency, and coordination of the student-doctors’ clinical education as well as preparation for graduate medical education (GME) and board examinations.

• Get to know our Core Rotation Sites

Fourth Year – OMS-IV

During OMS-IV, you explore GME training opportunities through our Core Rotation Sites.

During the hospital-based sub-internships – consisting of three core elective rotations in internal medicine, emergency medicine, and surgery – you gain the opportunity to develop the knowledge and skills required to be a resident in their desired GME training program.

A notable aspect of the clinical program is a required month-long rotation in a rural practice setting. In community health centers, rural clinics, and hospitals throughout the state of Virginia, you, as a student-doctor, will participate in providing health care to medically underserved and indigent patients. You learn to treat various patients whose lifestyles, practices, and attitudes toward health care differ from those seen in more traditional training sites. This enriching educational experience is one that cannot be taught in the classroom.

Your First Two-Years at LUCOM

The curriculum in the first two-years is a blended, spiral curriculum featuring a variety of learning modalities, including active learning, and clinical experiences. This phase of the training provides the opportunity for students to develop professional ethical standards and well as behaviors expected of osteopathic physicians, in addition to learning the medical knowledge and skills required to graduate as an osteopathic physician.

Receive extensive lab-based opportunities in:

Your Third- and Fourth-Years at LUCOM

LUCOM student-doctors have the opportunity to perform clinical rotations globally during their OMS-III and OMS-IV year, as well as the opportunity to participate in medical outreach events during breaks. These opportunities start near the end of the first-year of education.

Receive professional experience through:

• Clinical Rotations
• Medical Outreach

Interprofessional Education

LUCOM’s curriculum integrates interprofessional education opportunities and events across the four years of the DO program. These academic and clinical opportunities across the curriculum allow students to work with team members to maintain a climate of shared values, ethical conduct, and mutual respect; use the knowledge of one’s own role and team members’ expertise to address health outcomes; communicate in a responsive, responsible, respectful, and compassionate manner with team members; and apply values and principles of the science of teamwork to adapt one’s own role in a variety of team settings.

LUCOM is continuing to develop strong professional relationships with Liberty University School of Law to enable opportunities to study and advance public health and health policy. Additionally, LUCOM works with Liberty University’s School of Nursing, School of Health Sciences, School of Behavioral Sciences, and School of Divinity to advance health care team settings and promote interdisciplinary cooperation both in the classroom and in all of its clinical settings.