INTERCOLLEGE is negotiating a series of agreements with universities around the world in order to convince the government to approve its plans for a private medical school.
The Dean of the medical school of the University of Cincinnati, John Hutton, began a four-day visit to Cyprus yesterday to lend support to Intercollege’s efforts to start teaching clinical medicine in the £3.5 million building, completed in October 1999.
Intercollege signed an agreement with Cincinnati less than a year ago, in which Cincinnati has promised to help develop teaching programmes for the proposed medical school in Nicosia.
The Education Ministry has still not replied to a licence application, submitted nearly four years ago.
The law stipulates that a reply should have been given within 75 days.
The first pre-med students, who graduated from Intercollege in June, were forced to leave Cyprus to continue their studies elsewhere.
They have all had their pre-clinic studies recognised by the institutions they have moved on to.
“If they [the government] have a real intention of making Cyprus into an educational centre, they’ve got to realise that we are already centuries behind other countries, so we’ve got to run with the speed of light if we are to catch up, let alone overtake, because to become an international centre our facilities have to be so good as to be better. We can’t walk with the pace of a tortoise and expect to win a marathon,” the dean of Intercollege, Nicos Peristianis told the Cyprus Mail.
Cincinnati is one of several universities in the US, Canada and Israel that Intercollege has approached for help in formulating their curriculum.
Although Intercollege is also keen to team up with UK establishments, the North American model of small-intake medical schools for students who have already completed an undergraduate degree is not subscribed to in Europe.
The Cyprus Medical Association supports the medical school plan and the state-run Cyprus University does not see Intercollege’s English-language medical school as a threat to its plans for a Greek-language equivalent.
The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.
