New Haven, Conn.-based Yale School of Medicine's blended online physician assistant program was denied by the Accreditation Review Commission on Education for the Physician Assistant, according to the Yale Daily News.
The university pitched the program in March as a "class expansion" to the current PA program. It would have increased the PA program from 36 students to up to 350 students by offering online instruction and remote clinical rotations. The proposed program would have the same admissions criteria, curriculum, exams and assessments, according to the report. However, the program was met with demur from students and alumni of Yale's existing PA program, who felt the online program should not be treated as an expansion of the current PA program.
The proposal was denied due to a new policy that prohibits programs from asking for class expansions within four years of another proposal, the Yale PA program director James Van Rhee, told the Yale Daily News. However, the dean of the medical school, Robert Alpern, MD, said the program was denied because it was not similar enough to the existing program to be considered an expansion, according to the report.
"If we want to have the program, we will have to do it as a separate program and not as an expansion," Dr. Alpern told the Yale Daily News.
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