White Coat Ceremony - 2024

When

August 16th, 2024
5:30 p.m. - 7:30 p.m.

Where

Jefferson Center

Contact

Dr. Angelica Witcher: angelicaw@vt.edu

Hotel Information

Hilton Garden Inn Roanoke

4500 South Peak Blvd.,Roanoke, VA 24018

Booking Link: VTCSOM Hilton Garden Inn

SpringHill Suites Roanoke

301 Reserve Ave. SW, Roanoke, VA 24016

Booking Link: VTCSOM SpringHill Suites Roanoke

White Coat Ceremony

The purpose of the ceremony is to clarify for students, prior to their entrance into the medical community, that a physician’s responsibility is to both take care of patients and also to care for patients. In other words, doctors should care as well as cure. The Arnold P. Gold Foundation designed the White Coat Ceremony to welcome entering medical students and help them to establish a psychological contract for the practice of medicine. The event emphasizes the importance of compassionate care for the patient as well as scientific proficiency and includes several elements:

Welcome to the profession of medicine by the dean and faculty

Recitation or discussion of an oath (such as the Hippocratic Oath or a student-written oath), which represents the public acknowledgment by the students of the responsibilities of the profession and their willingness to assume such obligations in the presence of family, friends, and faculty

Cloaking of students in their first white coats

An address by an eminent physician role model

Statement about accessibility and accommodation

The Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine is committed to creating an inclusive and accessible event. All virtual events will have automated captions. Recorded events will have edited captions available soon after the event. If you desire live captioning or a sign language interpreter, please contact the organizer two weeks before the event. 

For in-person events, the main VTCSOM building at Riverside 2 is wheelchair accessible from the elevators inside the parking garage. Blind or visually impaired users may need assistance finding the elevators under the building, or using the stairs in front of the building.

If you need a reasonable accommodation to attend an in-person event, please contact the organizer of the event. All reasonable accommodation requests should be made no less than 2 weeks before the event. We will attempt to fulfill requests made after this date but cannot guarantee they will be met.