JMUST Tribute to Sesquicentennial of UST - Faculty of Medicine and Surgery

The JMUST editorial board, authors and peer reviewers celebrate the University of Santo Tomas Faculty of Medicine and Surgery, USTFMS’s 150th anniversary and numerous achievements, particularly its commitment to public health. With the covid pandemic, the USTFMS faculty and alumni were and continue to be in the frontlines, treating patients and developing clinical studies. Even with the citywide lockdowns, USTFMS never wavered in delivering high quality education and research. There is even a new research facility slated for construction: Saints Cosmas and Damian Simulation and Research Building.

Accolades are due and in time for the USTFMS’s Sesquicentennial Celebration when UST achieved the coveted Five Star rating for Specialist Criteria - the University’s Doctor of Medicine program, recently released by the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) Rating. In tandem, UST was awarded the overall Five Star rating and became the first Philippine university to receive that QS rating. The United Kingdom based QS is the world’s leading provider of analytics to the global higher education sector.

The premiere in education and research, USTFMS continues to grow and innovate with footprints of its alumni and their research in the Philippines, Asia Pacific, Europe and North America. JMUST contributes to these footprints with our publications. The JMUST editorial team are grateful to USTFMS and UST-Hospital for the foresight and unrelenting belief in the value of research studies and the need for an efficient globally accessible publication.

JMUST rode the bullet train of electronic authoring and publication like most major medical journals of the world. Ease and speed in article submissions and peer reviews are the main advantages of electronic authoring. JMUST has a dedicated electronic platform for authors to submit articles for peer review and have seamless communication with the editorial team and reviewers prior to publication. With the advent of high-speed internet and integrated applications in smart devices, it is no longer tenable to have article submissions on paper or in email attachments which are not only slow but difficult to track. 

Slower still is the laborious process of printing journals and then distributing them. With secure electronic publishing, articles are published online and accessible for reading and downloading in any smart device. The relevance and timeliness of research are significantly valued when readers have access to them anytime and anywhere with the internet. 

Going on its fifth year of electronic publishing, JMUST has received hundreds of article submissions. Although foreseen, it is unprecedented in the history of USTFMS and UST-Hospital research publications. 

JMUST’s global footprints through the publication of research works by its committed authors would not have been possible without the strong track record of excellence and credibility of USTFMS as a medical school. Once again, we applaud and celebrate the century and a half of significant existence and growth of USTFMS.

For our fifth volume, we have five clinical studies, two case studies, one qualitative research, one action research, one on education and one invited speech, for a total of 11 JMUST articles. 

We are grateful for all the diligent work of the editorial team, peer reviewers and authors.

CC BY: Open Access Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/