Classes are set to begin for 20 Island students who are attending Prince Edward Island’s new medical school, which serves as the regional home for Memorial University’s doctor of medicine program.
Despite the fact that construction on the building on the north end of the UPEI campus is not completed, Dr. Peter MacPherson said things have been sailing smoothly to date.
“So far it’s going really well,” said the Queen Elizabeth Hospital pediatrician who also serves as the associate dean for the P.E.I. Campus of Memorial University’s faculty of medicine. “Last week we had orientation, so the students got a lot of introductory information about the program and got to meet themselves as a group as well as their colleagues in Newfoundland.”
MacPherson said orientation plans had to change due to the Air Canada work stoppage. The original plan was to fly the students to St. John’s for orientation on the Memorial campus, then fly them back to Charlottetown to finish it. The whole thing was done virtually instead.
“This is a big moment — first for our 20 students, but also it’s also a big moment for the institutions and the province,” MacPherson said.
“We are now going to have people training to do their entire MD here on P.E.I., as well as train more doctors as a province.”
A student who takes this program would be fully trained to become a doctor in six years: four working on the medical degree and two more years in a medical residency program.
“So if someone was going to graduate from our class as a family physician, that’ll be six years from now,” MacPherson said.
Staff to number 130 to 150
Eventually, there are plans for the UPEI Faculty of Medicine and the Memorial Faculty of Medicine to work together to create a joint medical degree.
Paul Young, the chief operating officer with the UPEI organization, said many dozens of people will be working at this new school.
“Between all the different users, you might see at any given point 130 to 150 in terms of staff.”
Young’s looking forward to the beginning of April, when the building’s use will hit a peak.
“The hope would be [that] by April 1, 2026, we would have the building just… bustling full,” he said. “Full with staff, everything’s connected, learners, stakeholders and partners that would access the spaces.”
The cost of this building has been split among a few parties, with a total cost of $103 million.
“We had a $19.5-million investment from the federal government, UPEI had committed $10 million towards the capital investment, and the difference was being paid by the province,” Young said.
Sticking their heads in a virtual heart
That kind of money allows for some advanced technology.
For example, classrooms in P.E.I. are going to be connected to lectures taking place in St. John’s, and the N.L. students will be able to listen in on lectures in Charlottetown.
That’s pretty standard for long-distance tech these days, but then there’s the faculty’s mixed-reality technology.
“It’s really fascinating,” said Young. “To simplify it, it looks like a virtual-reality headset, but you can actually see your surroundings.
“It will project anatomical structures. So a group of learners or students, four to five of them, could have these headsets on to project a heart, for example. They could stick their head in it and look around; they could expand it.”
Young said these tools are meant to be used in smaller groups, compared to larger classes in other universities, and will definitely complement the learning experience.
Medical home to accept up to 10,000 patients
A medical home to treat actual patients is set to open as part of this, which will be run by Health P.E.I. starting “mid to late October,” Young said.
“At that point, if Health P.E.I. chooses to move in, we can work through that plan,” he said. “If they needed a little bit later, it’s really to their purview. At that point it would be available to them to move in.”
Gord McNeilly, the Liberal MLA for Charlottetown-West Royalty, said he has concerns regarding when a patient clinic administered by Health P.E.I. will start operating to relieve some of the pressure on other health care providers.
At the moment, more than 35,000 people are waiting for a family doctor or nurse practitioner, according to the P.E.I. Patient Registry.
“It’s a big medical home,” McNeilly noted. “At first it was going to be a 10,000-person medical home. Now it’s [only] up to 10,000 people — and that’s going to be a lot of people come off the registry.”
He said Health P.E.I. CEO Melanie Fraser has talked in standing committees about it being open in October.
“That’s the timeline I’m holding her to because that will affect a lot of people — hopefully in my community — to get them off that list.”
Just over two months into her job, Health P.E.I. CEO Melanie Fraser answered MLAs’ questions about UPEI’s new medical school for the first time during a legislative standing committee. Here, she responds to a question from the Green Party’s Karla Bernard about how the new faculty will improve health care in the province, in both the short and long term.
McNeilly said the Progressive Conservative government had not kept past promises on health care, in particular a pledge to open 30 medical homes by the end of 2024.
“They have not opened any since 2022,” he said. “Those are the promises that were made, and I’m going to hold them accountable for that.”
Another point of contention for McNeilly is the province not requiring those who graduate from the Island’s medical school to agree to work in this province for at least a certain number of years, something called a return of service.
“It’s terrible. It’s one of the questions I’ve asked in standing committees: Are we doing a return of service for residents here in Prince Edward Island? And that’s crucial, and I’m going to keep them accountable for that.”
