An Australian Medical School in New Orleans - The Changing Landscape in Higher Education

I was alerted to an new and interesting collaboration between Ochsner Health System in Louisiana and the University of Queensland Medical School in Brisbane, Australia from an article entitled “Australians Open U.S. Med School” by Elizabeth Redden on insidehighered.com.




This agreement is the first of its kind in the United States and one that will serve as a model for future/similar developments we are sure to see in the future. You can learn more about this new program on the University of Queensland School of Medicine website here which includes a video (4:06 minutes) from the press conference led by Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal. You can als read the press release and watch the same video on the Ochsner website here.


An interesting note from the press conference that caught my attention was the mention that Alton Ochsner (founder of Ochsner Health System) spent some of his medical school studies in Europe. I discovered that Alton Ochsner held a surgical residencies in the early 1920’s under Professor Paul Clairmont in Zurich and under Professor Victor Schmieden in Frankfurt, for a total of two years. You can learn more about Dr. Alton Ochsner here. Of special note...Alton Ochsner is the person who identified the link between tobacco use and lung cancer!