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Originally established as the Pennsylvania College of Optometry (PCO) in 1919, Salus University in Elkins Park, PA, has evolved into a professional school with a broader dedication to healthcare. With the institution incorporating more and more healthcare programs, it took on a new moniker in 2008-"Salus," which is Latin for "health and well-being"-making PCO one of four colleges within the university, along with the College of Health Sciences, the College of Education and Rehabilitation and the George S. Osborne College of Audiology.
As its name suggests, the audiology program was the brainchild of George S. Osborne, PhD, DDS, a man on a mission who was looking to elevate the audiology profession as part of the AuD movement.
"Dr. Osborne was looking to get audiology out of the graduate schools and into a professional model so that audiologists were trained like other doctoral level healthcare providers-the optometrist, the dentists, the physicians," says Victor Bray, PhD, dean of audiology. "You can see why this place became so attractive because of the history establishing optometry, leading the optometry field with the new degree and educational model to becoming a new profession. That's exactly the path audiology needed to be on, so he had the trailblazers here who have done it in a related field."
Salus, then still known as PCO, responded favorably to his mission, and in 2000 the school opened an AuD distance bridge program for practicing audiologists. Three years later, Salus admitted its first residential class; the AuD program now houses 65 students:
Class of 2011 - 9;
Class of 2012 - 16;
Class of 2013 - 20;
Class of 2014 - 20.
A School Dedicated to Healthcare
With the program housed in a school dedicated to healthcare, it may come as no surprise that the AuD program at Salus employs a holistic approach. The first year of the program delves heavily into the biomedical sciences to give students a good base and prepare them to be part of the interdisciplinary healthcare team.
"If you're going to try to be peer to peer with physicians, especially physicians in your specialty area, you need to be able to walk the walk and talk the talk with them, and that begins with understanding the biomedical sciences-and not just the biomedical sciences of your particular part of the body, like how the ear works, but the biomedical sciences as a holistic approach of the person," Dr. Bray says. "That was something that attracted Dr. Osborne here, because he felt the doctor of audiology needed to function as an autonomous practitioner as part of the healthcare team to manage patients; they need to be able to communicate peer to peer with everybody out there, so again, you've got to be grounded in the biomedical sciences if you're going to hold your own at the table when talking about patient management."
This base education prepares students to communicate with other healthcare professionals, thus putting them in a better position to acquire referrals in the future if they go into practice management.
"You want the physicians to be able to engage with you as partners in the healthcare delivery system, and they're going to engage with people that they're comfortable with and communicate well with," Dr. Bray says. "People they trust to take good care of their patients when they refer them, and our graduates are telling us that's working, and this is a key part of it."
Additionally, almost all classes at Salus are taught by content experts, something that is made easier by having so many other profession programs in the school.
"Because we have so many specialists from a lot of different backgrounds, there's a lot of experience to pull from," Dr. Bray explains. "The person who teaches our pharmacology course is a pharmacist, and she teaches in the Doctor of Optometry (OD) program, the Physician Assistant (PA) program and our program. The person who teaches neuroanatomy is a neuroanatomist, and the person who teaches biochemistry is a biochemist, and the person who teaches psychophysics is a person who researches in psychophysics."
Clinical Training
Salus has three on-campus laboratories dedicated to the development of clinical skills. The first lab students encounter during their training is the auditory assessment lab where they learn the basic diagnostic procedures like audiometry and tympanometry. Later, students move on to advanced labs dedicated to electrodiagnostics and vestibular issues.
"What's really great about these labs is that they're open every day, and they're open all day long so that students can go in and have access to the labs," Dr. Bray says. "They practice with each other, they team up and test each other, they bring in family and friends and practice on them. They don't have to wait for the equipment to open up-these are dedicated teaching laboratories to hone their clinical sciences, and the students have access to them."
Students are able to take the clinical skills they've honed in the labs and refine them in the Pennsylvania Ear Institute (PEI), Salus' on-campus, community-based hearing and balance center. Students rotate through PEI during their first two years before moving off campus for externship opportunities.
"We're trying to show our students a private practice model," says Tricia Dabrowski, AuD, director of PEI. "Our students enter the clinic on their first day on campus, and then over two years, we move them very rapidly from observation to independent working with preceptors."
According to Dr. Bray, PEI not only helps students enhance their clinical skills, but also provides them with an early understanding of practice management.
"It's autonomous as a business unit, so our students are involved in it as a private practice that is serving the community," he says. "So the students are seeing and learning how to run, not a campus speech and hearing clinic, but an independent audiology practice. They're getting experience with that in the front office, learning billing and coding from the very beginning."
Great Location
Salus' location in Elkins Park, PA, provides great opportunities for student life. The immediate area offers the amenities of a small, old town, but it's only a short 20-minute car ride to Philadelphia, one of the biggest cities in the country.
"I know we're just 10 miles north of the city center, but I'm looking out at a park-like environment here," Dr. Bray says. "We have a beautiful area here that's really conducive to a nice educational environment, but just right down the road is the big city. You've got all the major sports represented in town, great culture, music, the arts, the museums, nightlife, recreation-it's great."
In addition to the great nightlife and culture, being in a major city also offers a lot of outside clinical opportunities. "There are so many excellent medical facilities in this area; we have a lot of places for our students to go for their clerkships and for their rotations, including the number one pediatric hospital in the country (Children's Hospital of Philadelphia) and our students are there regularly," Dr. Bray says.
In addition, Elkins Park is centrally located on the East coast, offering a myriad of recreational opportunities. Salus is just two hours from both the Pocono Mountains and the Jersey shore, and major cities like Washington, DC, Baltimore and New York are all close enough for a weekend-or even one-day-trip.
Distance Program: Past and Future
The AuD program at Salus first opened as a distance bridge program for practicing audiologists in 2000. After 10 years, the distance program will be closing shop, a move that echoes the recent closing of the Audiology Foundation of America.
"It's part of a master plan," Dr. Bray explains. "Dr. Osborne and others envisioned that the AuD bridge programs would work for a defined period of time, and those AuD bridge programs would be used to jump-start the profession and transition us from a masters-driven field to an AuD-driven field. Without the AuD programs, it would've taken decades for us to become a majority AuD field, and with the AuD bridge programs, clearly in ten years, we were able to get 5,500 students out through the five programs and couple that with the 2,000 students that have come through the residential programs, you've got 7,500 students-7,500 AuD holders, who now constitute 50 percent or more of the profession depending on whose numbers you use. It's been the plan all along that this was a transition program."
Although it is closing shop, the existence of the distance program has been, and should continue to represent, a tremendous networking opportunity for resident students. During its run, Salus' distance program allowed the program to amass more than 2,000 graduates, which amounts to nearly a quarter of all AuD holders.
"For our resident students this represents tremendous opportunities for their clinical educations-their clerkships and their national externships," Dr. Bray says. "Beyond that, it sets up networking opportunities. Many of our distance graduates are looking for junior partners in their practices, and our resident students are anxious to become autonomous deliverers of audiology healthcare. They're looking for mentors and senior business partners, and we are in the process of pairing our students with alumni."
According to Dr. Bray, Salus already has identified new missions for the faculty that previously ran the distance education program, including high quality continuing education, certificate programs for areas like practice management and involvement in courses related to specialty certifications, such as the cochlear implant certification that has been developed by the American Board of Audiology in conjunction with the American Academy of Audiology, and the upcoming one for pediatrics.
"The history of this institution is always to be pushing at the edge of education. It started with the optometry program 91 years ago, it continued with the founding of this program 10 years ago and it goes on with these missions," Dr. Bray says. "The Osborne College of Audiology is a working laboratory to see what we can do and how we can improve and drive forward the profession of audiology. It's a new environment here, a new structure and just an exciting place to be."
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