Points of Pride - School of Medicine
- The Association for Medical Education in Europe (AMEE), which has members in 90 countries on five continents, recognized the SIU School of Medicine for its medical education programs. SIU is the only medical school to earn recognition in all three areas – student assessment, student engagement, and social accountability.
- The General Surgery Residency Program now includes a rotation with Southern Illinois Healthcare to send third- and fourth-year general surgery residents to train alongside surgeons practicing in Southern Illinois hospitals.
- A new robotic procedure that allows surgeons to make a single incision through the navel for hysterectomy patients is now available at the School of Medicine’s Simmons Cancer Institute in Springfield.
- The SIU Center for Family Medicine, located in Springfield, has been serving patients in central Illinois for more than 40 years. In 2012, it was designated a federally qualified health center or FQHC, also referred to as a community health center. With another access point in Quincy, the facilities serve 22,000 patients annually with more than 75,000 visits, and both are family medicine residency and physician assistant training sites.
- Surgeon Dr. Kevin T. McVary, professor and chair of the Division of Urology, and his staff have performed a new, minimally invasive, outpatient medical procedure -- water vapor therapy -- for treating an enlarged prostate. The treatment was approved by the FDA in winter 2015, and SIU will now be instructing urologists from around the country on how to perform this technique. SIU’s urology group was one of the country’s first test sites for the device’s clinical trials.
- Research scientist Don Caspary has received a five-year grant from the National Institute of Deafness and Other Communicative Disorders within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to advance his study of hearing loss and speech understanding in the elderly. The total budget for the project is $2.6 million.