University of Lethbridge funding aimed at boosting rural medicine

C A LG ARY In a move designed to ease a shortage of physicians in rural southern Alberta, $43 million in funding was announced in the province's budget Thursday for a training program at the University of Lethbridge.

Dr. Digvir Jayas, the university's president and vice-chancellor, said Friday the initiative, a partnership with the University of Calgary, will lead to more doctors practising medicine in rural areas.

“Access to a family physician is an incredible challenge for many families in small- to mid-sized centres across southern Alberta — including rural and Indigenous communities,” said Jayas in a statement to Postmedia. “(Thursday's) announcement will greatly improve health outcomes for Albertans and access to family physicians.”

A building at the University of Lethbridge, the Community Centre for Wellness, will be renovated into a medical school and multidisciplinary teaching clinic.

“Renovating an existing building for these important activities is also a prudent investment and will accelerate the establishment of a rural physician training program,” said Jayas.

Dr. Todd Anderson, dean of the University of Calgary's Cumming School of Medicine, said Friday that University of Calgary's medical school proposes to have as many as 30 undergraduate medical students learn at the Lethbridge satellite location, and to increase residency positions to go along with that.

It's not clear yet when students will start receiving medical training in Lethbridge.

“In the next one to two years, we will hopefully have renovations done at the distributed site in Lethbridge and have first- and second-year medical students training there,” he said in an interview Friday.

The curriculum could be modified to give it a more rural focus, said Anderson.

“There would be the ability of us to streamline the admission process, so we would take more rural students, more Indigenous students,” he said.

This model has worked in British Columbia and every other province, said Anderson.

“If you take a student who is from southern Alberta and you train them locally and you do their residency locally, the vast majority will stay rurally and in rural centres” such as Lethbridge, he said. “But if you don't do that, there's a very small chance they would go to regional or rural centres if they've trained in Calgary.”

With a small class size of 30, some medical students who grew up in Calgary might want to train in Lethbridge, said Anderson.

“There's lots of advantages to training in a small centre,” he said.