Unaizah College of Medicine and Medical Sciences (UCM) at Qassim University (QU) in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was established in Year 1432 Hijri (2011 AC) in accordance with the kingdom vision of providing the Saudi people and the residents of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) with high quality comprehensive, and cost effective healthcare. Thus, the college was founded as a necessity for having another medical college in the geographically broad and big Province of Qassim, in addition to the Mother College of Medicine in QU, and to develop into a distinguished national and regional health professions education resource center.

Therefore, the MD Program was established in UCM to satisfy the dramatic improvement and development in all aspect s of life, which the KSA has witnessed during the last few decades. Health services in particular have developed with a faster momentum as indicated by the improved accessibility and coverage indicators of healthcare services. There have been also improvements in all healthcare indicators. However, it is noted that Saudi national health manpower is not developing in parallel with the pace of the developmental growth. Thus, the need for expansion in health profession education is well justifiable to fill up the great need for health professionals.

There is even a greater need for changing medical education and medical practice in the KSA in order to produce health professionals in the needed numbers, at the right time and the appropriate place, and with the a propriate competencies that comply with the approved Saudi competence specification for Saudi medical graduates the Saudi-Meds. This is a national frame work for a competence specification for Saudi medical graduates that was developed in order to ensure t he delivery of equivalent standards between medical colleges throughout the country while guaranteeing the colleges' autonomy at the same time.

Furthermore, all medical schools in the KSA follow the European/Australian medical education system and award the degree of Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery (MBBS; MBChB) upon satisfactorily completing a 6 year medical program with a 1 year structured compulsory rotating internship. Many of the medical schools in the KSA adopt the traditional discipline based approaches in their medical curricula. In these conventional approaches, there is lack of horizontal and vertical integration between the basic bio medical knowledge and clinical reasoning and thus knowledge is often delivered fragmented and disintegrated. The teaching and learning strategies in the traditional system are mostly teacher centered with the students taking only minimal responsibilities for their own learning.

Another major criticism of the traditional approach is that it is very less community oriented. Medical schools following this system therefore produce graduates who opt to work only in urban areas and thus contributing further to poor distribution of stable national health personnel and services throughout the KSA.

Some medical schools in the KSA adopt the modern integrated system based modular curriculum supported by Problem Based Learning; PBL tutorials. In work place settings, healthcare professional should work in teams.

However, to the best of our knowledge, none of the medical schools neither in the KSA, nor in the Gulf region adopt the more recent TBL Based (Team Based Learning) educational system, as the cornerstone learning strategy. Therefore, the establishment of a new medical college in Unaizah; Unaizah College of Medicine and Medical Sciences (UCM), which implements the most recent trends and advances in Health Professions Education; particularly the adoption of the TBL-based approach as the main learning and assessment strategy as the main learning and assessment strategy in delivering the MD Program was needed to respond to these medical education/technological challenges.

UCM intends to provide a distinguished medical education environment that comply with the national and international accreditation and quality assurance standards in all educational and administrative aspects. This ensures achievement of the medical professional competencies among graduates of the MD Program who will participate effectively in disseminating health awareness and providing distinct healthcare services in their communities in a professional and humanistic way. UCM, therefore, aims to graduate physicians/health professionals and further train them on a high level of medical knowledge and on the ability of self professionals and on the ability of self-directed life-long learning, analytical thinking, and problem-solving skills, and to guide them to develop scientific research and promote their personal and professional development and their readiness for leadership.