$577 million provided for new Alberta health and learning centre

Alberta has committed $577 million to build a world-class health and learning facility that will change the way patients are diagnosed and treated and how medical students are trained.

The clinic-style facility being built in Edmonton will offer one-stop access to a number of health services and teams of specialists. It will provide patients with coordinated diagnostic and specialist services while providing unprecedented research and educational opportunities for health sciences students at the University of Alberta.

This means a patient who meets with a specialist and then needs a series of diagnostic tests or consultations with other health professionals will have more timely care, often within the same day.

The number of University of Alberta health sciences students benefiting from the enhanced learning opportunities to be offered in the centre is expected to reach 12,000 by 2020. Students will learn alongside one another to ultimately deliver totally informed and balanced patient care.

Faculties involved with the centre could include:

• medicine and dentistry,
• rehabilitation medicine,
• nursing,
• pharmacy and pharmaceutical sciences,
• physical education and recreation, and
• agriculture, forestry and home economics.

The new centre will help serve the needs of people coming to the Capital Health region from long distances to receive care. Currently more than 25 per cent of the people who use Capital Health services come from outside the capital area, mainly from central and northern Alberta.

The new Health Sciences Ambulatory Learning Centre is scheduled to open in 2009.

http://www.gov.ab.ca