Bonaire to be a Municipal of Netherlands and the Status of Saint James School of Medicine

Ok, there is a lot of questions of what will happen to SJSM when Bonaire becomes a direct part of Netherlands. I sat down with a teacher from the administration in Bonaire and he told me what the current status of the school is.

Any medical institution that does not pass the Dutch accreditation board will loose the IMED status. Now what does that mean? SJSM is listed on WHO and it has a IMED status because Bonaire is autonomous from the Kingdom of Netherlands. A medical school must have IMED status in order for their students to sit for USMLE. However, as of end of this year the island will be a municipal of Netherlands, so it will loose its autonomy. After the integration of Bonaire to Netherlands, all institutions are to pass the Dutch accreditation. The accreditation board came by a while ago and told the school to improve in certain sectors in order to gain accreditation. That’s why, ever since I came here last year, I saw workers constantly working on this and that around the school. Chicago representatives also came by last semester to help out in IT networking improvements, up-to-date computers, surveillance cameras, new desks, etc. I heard the surveillance cameras are linked to the dean’s office and also to the Chicago office. One student gave the middle finger to the camera in the student lounge and the next thing you know the dean came in and called him to his office…lol.

Dutch consultants already came by SJSM recently and submitted what they saw to the accreditation board. Now the board will come by to inspect the school based on the report they got. The administration official, who spoke to me, told me that there is a 90% chance that the school will be approved and a 10% chance that the school will not. He assured me that since there is a second campus in Anguilla, it won’t make that much of a difference if the school doesn’t get approved. The school is being improved based on the instructions that the Dutch accreditation board gave to SJSM when they first inspected it.

I doubt anything negative will come out of this whole transition. SJSM is already a decade old, and on top of that, the institution is established in Bonaire with a lot of improvements based on the accreditation board’s specifications. Also, they have close proximity with the hospitals in America. The hospitals get a lot of money from Caribbean schools to provide IMG students with rotations.