Southern Illinois University School of Medicine

Southern Illinois University School of Medicine is a medical school located in Springfield, the capital of the U.S. state of Illinois. It is part of the Southern Illinois University system, which includes a campus in Edwardsville as well as the flagship in Carbondale. The medical school was founded in 1970 and achieved full accreditation in 1972. It was founded to relieve a chronic shortage of physicians in downstate Illinois.SIU is the only medical school in Illinois with its main campus outside of Chicago or its suburbs (although the University of Illinois maintains satellites in Champaign-Urbana, Peoria and Rockford). SIU was early to incorporate problem-based learning (PBL) into their curricula (see below) and "standardized patients" for medical student testing purposes. Being able to interact with standardized patients now comprises the majority of one of the four major exams that all US allopathic medical students must pass (the USMLE Step 2 Clinical Skills).[3] SIU students begin care of patients in a clinical setting within the first two weeks of classes. By the end of their first trimester, they are tested on their ability to obtain medical histories from, examine, and diagnose the diseases simulated by standardized patients. Such education measures and SIU's large primary care faculty led US News and World Report to rank SIU in the top 10 medical schools in the country for primary care in the early 1990s