From classroom to clinic: more docs in B.C.

New and expanded teaching facilities at hospitals and other medical centres across the province are helping the University of B.C.’s expanded Faculty of Medicine to produce more “made in B.C.” doctors.

For instance, on Vancouver Island, the Royal Jubilee Hospital and Victoria General Hospital have become two of 10 “clinical academic campuses” around B.C., with new classroom space, seminar rooms, academic staff offices and a medical library, as well as high-tech video-conferencing and e-learning systems linking them with the other clinical campuses.

These new campuses, built with $40 million from the Ministry of Health, are part of a plan to increase the number of doctors in British Columbia and encourage them to practise in less populated parts of the province. In fact, by this September, the number of first-year medical students in this province will have doubled, compared with 2003 – with new spaces for these students in Victoria, Prince George, the Fraser Valley and Vancouver.

Studies have shown that doctors tend to practise in the regions in which they are educated. That’s why UBC’s medical school was expanded to include the Island medical program, with its academic campus at the University of Victoria, and the northern medical program, based at the University of Northern B.C.

The new clinical academic campuses at Royal Jubilee Hospital and Victoria General Hospital are part of the Island medical program. They support clinical teaching of undergraduate medical students, postgraduate residents and faculty members. Island medical program students also study with doctors in other areas of Vancouver Island – and when they graduate, are more likely to set up their practices in those smaller, rural and coastal areas as a result.

A new clinical academic campus at the Royal Columbian Hospital in New Westminster supports the expanded Vancouver Fraser Medical Program. And Prince George Regional Hospital hosts the Clinical Academic Campus for the Northern Medical Program. That means if you grew up in the North, love the North and want to practise medicine in the North, the infrastructure is there.