Canada may soon have another medical school, albeit a small one. If the plan reaches fruition, the University of Northern British Columbia in Prince George will collaborate with the much larger University of British Columbia to launch a Northern Medical Program (NMP). Annual enrolment would be 15 to 20 students.
Part of an attempt to ease BC's chronic shortage of rural physicians, this plan is itself part of a proposed expansion of the UBC medical school's undergraduate and residency rural training programs. Under the Provincial Medical Education Plan (PMEP), undergraduate enrolment would increase from 120 to 200 students by 2006, with a corresponding increase in the number of residency positions.
The UBC medical school already has a “very successful” residency program in Prince George, and Dean John Cairns says many of its graduates stay in the North. Under the proposed NMP, students would complete about half of their medical education at the northern university and the remainder at UBC; they would graduate with a UBC medical degree.
The hope is that the northern program — slated to start by the fall of 2004 — would attract Aboriginal and other rural students who would be more likely to stay and practise in these underserviced areas. “I see this as a bold step in medical education in Canada,” says UNBC President Charles Jago, who studied similar programs in Scandinavia, Australia and the US.
UNBC already has nursing and master's degree programs in community health and is launching a health sciences program. Jago hopes the outcome of the new program will be similar to what he saw in Australia, where educators are focusing on making rural practice “an exciting and preferred form of practice for students entering medical school.” Residents and medical students will be tracked to see where they ultimately practise.