Photo by Kimberly Kintz Patrick Bankston, director of the Northwest Center for Medical Education, stands in one of the six new simulated exam rooms that students utilize during course work in patient care. Photo by Kimberly Kintz As tenants in the new building, the medical students now have several more spacious, updated small-group meeting rooms for their studies. This is an advantage for them because the students spend more of their time working out problems in teams than in traditional lecture-style classrooms.

Bankston

Bankston had served as interim director following the retirement of William Baldwin in August 2004. Bankston was one of the three candidates identified after a search and screen process that began last year.

“I am pleased to announce that Dr. Bankston has agreed to serve as the next Northwest Center director. Pat has many years of distinguished service at the center and for the school. He has been a true leader in our education mission. He is passionate about medical student education and about the center. Let’s all congratulate Pat and thank him for taking on this responsibility. We all look forward to working with him as we aspire to achieve our goals for the school and the center,” Brater said.

Bankston received his doctoral degree at the University of Chicago in anatomy and worked at Hahnemann University School of Medicine before joining IUSM at the Northwest Center in 1978. He has been a leader in curricular innovation, including the development of a problem- based learning curriculum at the Northwest Center in 1990.

In his capacity as statewide competency director for problem solving at IUSM, he has been one of the architects of the school’s competency-based curriculum, implemented during the 1999-2000 academic year. The idea behind the implementation was to address a number of skills required of physicians which might not be subject matter in the traditional curriculum.

IU Northwest is the host of and partner with the Northwest Center, which recently became the first tenants in the newly built Medical Professional Building. In mid-August, the center moved to the new three-story facility, which is adjacent to the program’s previous site on the Gary campus. The center has space for a genetics clinic and lab on the first floor, library and teaching facilities on the second floor, and center offices, research labs and offices and common equipment rooms on the third floor.

“This new building presents opportunities to collaborate with nursing and other professional education programs, to do bigger and better things for the medical school and university,” Bankston said.

Currently, the Northwest Center offers Indiana’s only problem-based learning medical curriculum, the Regional Center Alternative Pathway.

Widely recognized as a highly innovative program, the Regional Center Alternative Pathway embraces a clinical approach to instruction of basic sciences to medicine by exposing freshman and sophomore students to medical cases which reflect real-life situations and issues facing physicians.