Sunday, January 13, 2008 Healers with a golden touch
FOR 50 years, Cebu has always relied on one standard for high quality and service-oriented medical education: the Cebu Institute of Medicine (CIM).
Last Dec. 2-8, 2007, the borderless world joined Cebu in looking on with gratitude as the CIM celebrated its golden anniversary.
The theme “50 Years of Excellence in Medical Education” reverberates for a school that, from 33 pioneering graduates of Class 1962, has produced almost 5,000 graduates, 35 of whom graduated with honors.
A hundred and ten of CIM’s graduates are board placers, ranking in the Top 10 list of the Physician Licensure Examination. With a high overall passing percentage of 85 percent or more, CIM is one of the top five medical schools in the country.
Feeling a need to give students a chance to pursue medical education without leaving Cebu, Dr. Jacinto Velez Sr. established the Cebu Institute of Technology (CIT) College of Medicine, with the assistance of Epifania Mendoza-Velez, Dr. Eugenio Alonso, Dr. Benito Antigua, Dr. Uldarico Bacay, Dr. Nicolas Escario, Dr. Renato Espinosa and Dr. Jose Tolentino.
With the help of Dr. Virgilio Ramos (then the Dean of the University of Santo Tomas (UST) College of Medicine and a classmate of Dr. Jacinto Velez Sr.), the pioneer members of the faculty were recruited from Manila. This included Dr. Fernando Santos (Biochemistry) and Dr. Manuel Alvarez (Physiology and Pharmacology). The former members of the UST faculty moved to Cebu City to see to the birth of what was then known as the CIT College of Medicine.
The school opened its doors to 47 first-year medical students on June 10, 1957. In 1962, the school saw the first batch of its medical graduates, numbering 33, following the five-year curriculum.
With the establishment of the Velez College in 1966, the former CIT College of Medicine became the Cebu Institute of Medicine (CIM) after terminating its affiliation with CIT and converting it into a non-stock, non-profit corporation.
From its original beginnings at the back of the Cebu Velez General Hospital (then Velez Clinic), the CIM was housed in a five-story edifice at the corner of F. Ramos and V. Ranudo Sts.
In 1968, the school shifted from a five-year to a four-year curriculum. Although as early as 1996 CIM began to introduce the Problem-Based Learning (PBL) method of teaching in some of its classes, it was in 2001 when PBL was fully implemented.
In 1987, CIM was classified as Level IV (the highest category accorded by the Commission on Medical Education). In April of 1996, the Commission on Higher Education (Ched) recognized CIM as one of the three Centers of Excellence for Medicine. In September 2001, Ched granted CIM an autonomous status. The Cebu Velez General Hospital, CIM’s main training hospital, has a bed capacity of 200 patients and a 30-bassinet nursery. With its recent practice of having an infant room in with its mother, the hospital was declared as the first mother- and baby-friendly private institution in the country. At least 8,000 patients are served by the hospital each year. CIM’s community medico-social services also include a primary health care and lying-in center with a 10-bed capacity located at Pakna-an, Mandaue City.
CIM alumnus Dr. Henry Yu believes that the CIM training imbues its graduates with medical training, tempered with “self-restraint, sound judgment, firmness and fairness in whatever we do.”
This is the CIM legacy: “physicians with a heart.”
