THE RIGHT MEDICINE
University of Windsor's Schulich campus brings new life to local health care, Dave Waddell writes.
Gerry Cooper, associate dean of the Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry’s Windsor campus, pauses as if honing in on a diagnosis as he tries to describe the school’s impact over the last decade.
There are statistics. There are anecdotes. But Cooper opts for simple, incontrovertible evidence: physicians in Windsor and Essex County advertising that they are accepting new patients.
“We didn’t see that 10 years ago," said Cooper, who oversees the campus for London’s University of Western Ontario. “It was a crisis then when a primary caregiver retired or left because it left all kinds of people without a doctor.
"We still have a ways to go, but health care in this area is in much better shape and one of the reasons is because of the Schulich campus.”
About 90 physicians — graduates of the four-year program and others who have completed their family medicine residencies in Windsor — have remained in the area to practice since 2008.
The school is aiming to build on that success with a five-year psychiatry program — now in its fourth year — that will eventually have 10 students training at a time.
The medical school campus has also put Windsor on the map with physicians practising elsewhere.
“As soon as doctors learned of the plan, we began to see physicians who were interested in coming down here,” said David Musyj, CEO of the Windsor Regional Hospital. “We used to post jobs and hope we’d get one candidate from elsewhere in Ontario. After the Schulich announcement, we’ve had competition for positions.
“Schulich and the (planned new mega-hospital) are the two things always mentioned by doctors in interviews now.”
The relationship with the school is so vital that the hospital will soon require doctors who want privileges there to teach or be involved with the medical school in some way, Musyj said.
The full impact of the medical school won’t be felt for another 10 to 15 years, he said. “We started to see an impact from students staying here, but even those who leave after doing school here will remember the experience."
Dr. Carol Herbert was dean of the Schulich School when the Windsor campus opened.
She recalls the early bumps in the road, including a strike at the University of Windsor the first year.
But she mostly remembers the tremendous community will to grasp an opportunity to address the doctor shortage in the area.
“The Windsor campus has far exceeded expectations,” said Herbert, now retired and living in her native British Columbia.
Getting it off the ground required changing the mindset in London to view Windsor as part of its medical school, not a “a branch plant," she said. “It was essential to helping Windsor say it had arrived. We figure, in many ways, this created a sense of pride in the community.”
The campus concept, with smaller numbers of students and more access to physicians and hands-on experience, is now being recreated across the country, Herbert said. Windsor was seen as a outlier 10 years ago. “Now it’s viewed as a good model.”
Dwight Duncan, who was then Ontario’s finance minister, University of Windsor president Alan Wildeman, medical community leaders and local residents made an unshakable business case for Windsor’s medical school campus, she said.
“(Windsor Regional Hospital’s) Dr. Raphael Cheung was able to recruit and sweet talk a lot of people to take this on. This was extra time for people who were already very busy. They didn’t get paid much. They really were volunteers."
The University of Windsor and the local hospitals found money in their budgets to get a start on the infrastructure required to make the concept work.
“If the province changed its mind, we’d have been in a bit of trouble,” Wildeman said. “We were all committed to meeting a community need.”
He calls the partnership with Western one of the most unique the university has ever had.
“It’s worked so well because of the commitment of people at every level — from the community to local health-care leaders, the universities and their staff to political leaders,” Wildeman said.
“We’ve had a lot of generous donations locally to create scholarships for the medical students in Windsor.”
With the Schulich campus now well established and the agreement between Western and Windsor renewed last year for another decade, attention is being turned to the future.
That future involves the new $2-billion mega-hospital system and opportunities to leverage it into an international health-care hub. The Windsor medical school’s administration, faculty and students will be part of the planning process.
“These young doctors are going to be the ones staffing it, so we want to hear what they think should be in the new hospital,” Musyj said.
Dr. Michael Strong, the current dean of the Schulich School, feels the next step is expanding its research work.
The planned new Windsor hospital and advanced medical systems in Detroit provide readymade research partnerships.
“What’s medical education going to look like in Windsor embedded in the new hospital? That new physical plant is a game-changer," Strong said. “How are we going to grow international partnerships? I see growth on a multitude of fronts.”
He foresees the University of Windsor’s engineering program becoming an increasingly important partner for the medical school.
“There’s a lot of very good work being done in Windsor’s engineering program and engineering has a huge role to play in biomedical research,” Strong said. “It’s an interesting period for us.”