B.C. Election 2020: NDP pledges second medical school at Surrey SFU campus

[jb24]

2 hours ago, BCelectrophile said:

Ok so I did a bit of detective work for anyone interested. In addition to the SFU medical school announcements:

New UBC Surrey campus announced located right by Surrey Memorial - https://604now.com/ubc-campus-surrey-renderings-2021/

New Surrey Hospital announced to be built in Cloverdale -https://www.fraserhealth.ca/news/2019/Dec/its-official-second-hospital-coming-for-people-in-surrey#.YYa9VCRfMlQ

New Fraser Medical Cohort announced - 32 students out of the VFMP class will complete clerkship in Fraser valley https://mdprogram.med.ubc.ca/2021/06/08/vancouver-fraser-medical-program-fraser-medical-cohort-year-3-clinical-clerkship/

Somehow seems like all these things are connected. Maybe we will get both a UBC Fraser cohort AND an SFU medical school 

Well, that would be wasteful considering how much easier it is to scale up than start something brand new. I think UBC will just expand and maybe throw on some red colours or do some sort of quasi partnership with SFU. 

NDP can then say they fulfilled their nonsensical election promise. Just my cynical opinion...

[frenchpress]

1 hour ago, Redpill said:

think at this point if UBC decides to completely split off a cohort of students to Fraser for the full four years, it'll be done with existing spots, i.e. 32 of the 192 from the current VFMP site. I doubt the government will fund more spots at this time.

Edit: Agree that if a full split occurs it would almost certainly be from the existing cohort. I doubt they’d split the full 4 years though - unless UBC is planning to eliminate gross anatomy, it’s unlikely they’d be able to host a cohort out there. 

[BCelectrophile]

2 hours ago, frenchpress said:

Edit: Agree that if a full split occurs it would almost certainly be from the existing cohort. I doubt they’d split the full 4 years though - unless UBC is planning to eliminate gross anatomy, it’s unlikely they’d be able to host a cohort out there. 

I mean I bet it won’t be that hard to build an anatomy lab and some lecture halls/small group rooms in the new hospital or the new UBC campus. I think UBC really likes to drive home the value of having students complete all their education at distributed sites, hence why we usually only do 1st semester at UBC Vancouver rather than all 2 years of preclinical (and now we are even doing 1st semester at distributed sites due to Covid).

I would bet money that it will be a SFU/UBC partnership just like every other distributed site, and not a standalone medical school.

[Redpill]

18 hours ago, BCelectrophile said:

I mean I bet it won’t be that hard to build an anatomy lab and some lecture halls/small group rooms in the new hospital or the new UBC campus. I think UBC really likes to drive home the value of having students complete all their education at distributed sites, hence why we usually only do 1st semester at UBC Vancouver rather than all 2 years of preclinical (and now we are even doing 1st semester at distributed sites due to Covid).

I would bet money that it will be a SFU/UBC partnership just like every other distributed site, and not a standalone medical school.

Agree that it would be straightforward to build a small anatomy lab and have a few of the profs be based at the Surrey site to teach anatomy there. The lectures are already streamed across the province before the lab itself, and if they're expanding health sciences capacity they'd probably want some anatomy capacity at the new site as well.

I think the time for an SFU/UBC partnership has passed. That would have been very likely a few years ago, but I think now that SFU has moved so far ahead on their medical school and apparently has provincial support, they're not going to settle for a satellite site. The province also seems to want to exert a lot of control on the direction of this new school, which they would not have with UBC.

[ShadesofCyan]

My impression is the SFU medical school seems to be completely separate from UBC and does not appear to be a potential distributed site. Time will tell I guess.