The dean of Dalhousie’s medical school says the CBU satellite campus will help meet local needs

The dean of Dalhousie University’s medical school in Halifax says training doctors at Cape Breton University should increase the province’s pool of doctors and help alleviate shortages on the island.

Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston has said he wants to open a medical school at CBU by 2025.

dr David Anderson said one of the goals is to educate new doctors on the needs of patients in the communities where they practice.

“At Cape Breton, we will focus on family medicine and rural medicine as these are the areas we want these students to excel in [in] and we also know that students who train close to home are much more likely to stay at home to work and live,” he said Information tomorrow Halifax.

Dalhousie, whose medical school is more than 150 years old, has operated a satellite campus for physician training in New Brunswick for more than a decade.

Anderson said CBU graduates will have a medical degree from Dal and that he will have the same weight as those in New Brunswick.

“Every performance metric shows that these students are doing just as well as the students who train in Halifax,” he said.

In addition to family and country medicine, doctors trained at CBU will also benefit from a close connection to the Mi’kmaq through Unama’ki College on the Sydney campus, Anderson said.

“We recognize that there are some unique opportunities with a large Indigenous population in Cape Breton and a very active Indigenous college within Cape Breton University.”

Dalhousie has long offered a significant amount of medical education in Cape Breton, he said, with an active resident education program dating back about 20 years and a more recent program in which some third-year students spend their entire year on the island .

“Many of the doctors in Cape Breton are graduates of this program and are now leading the education of tomorrow’s primary care physicians.”

Anderson said there are some concerns about the ability of local doctors to take on additional work to train new doctors, but he said studies show one way to prevent burnout is to offer a variety of opportunities that doctors are passionate about .

It is also crucial that the training courses are not attached at the end of a working day, but are planned in cooperation with the doctors themselves, he said.

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