Ready for the challenges
CEO welcomes medical school at UPEI as the end result will be worth all the effort
“Once we get there, it’s going to be a wonderful thing.”
Dr. Michael Gardam
Health P.E.I. CEO
The CEO of the province’s health authority said bringing a medical school to P.E.I. will cost money and require the right staff but will be well worth it.
Dr. Michael Gardam made the comments at the Health P.E.I. annual general meeting in Charlottetown Nov. 16.
“Having a medical school here is something that I have always supported. I would love the idea of us being in a more academic organization, more of an academic health authority,” said Gardam.
It will take time to transform the current system though, “because we’re not that currently,” said Gardam.
Health P.E.I. has started to collaborate with UPEI and others to take the first steps toward bringing a medical school to the province, in partnership with Memorial University. The plan was announced in October 2021. All of its 20 seats will be reserved for Island students, and one will be held for an Indigenous islander.
A new building is planned for the UPEI campus, and the project received $129 million in funding from the provincial government for the next six years.
The 20-seat school of medicine is scheduled to take in its first cohort of students in September 2024
“It’s a big undertaking for UPEI, it’s a big undertaking for the province and for us at Health P.E.I., but the thought of having residents and students around and teaching rounds and all of those good things, it really raises all of us up,” said Gardam.
“Once we get there, it’s going to be a wonderful thing.”
IMPACT
A question from the public sent to the meeting by email asked how the medical school will impact the existing health-care system.
It will mean recruiting academically minded physicians, said Gardam.
That might open up a new pool of interested candidates, he said, ones who wouldn’t have considered coming to P.E.I. before, without academic opportunities. There are also a number of doctors already on P.E.I. who are interested in becoming faculty.
The challenge for Gardam is to make sure there are enough doctors to go around if some of the current doctors decide to teach at the school.
“The danger is, what if we can’t pull that off? What happens if we can’t recruit these academic doctors who want to teach etcetera? Or what if we lose clinical doctors who want to be academics and there’s no one to back fill them? That’s going to be a problem for Islanders,” said Gardam.
“The bottom line is, we can’t let that happen. And we also can’t ask people to work 100 per cent clinical and then we’re going to add on 50 per cent teaching. That just leads to burned out people.”
The answer lies in working closely with the university and recruiting more doctors.
But recruitment is its own challenge.
“We are not currently resourced properly to turn these things around on a dime, so there’s a lot of investment that needs to go in there for us to be able for us to be able to do that quickly. So that’s a pressure,” he said. “Med school is a whole other ball game in terms of complexity and the hoops you have to jump through, but as I said, the end result – there’s a lot of rewards at the end.
“I’m not going to pretend that it’ll be easy for us to do this. We just have to plan now, invest in it properly to be able to do it properly. It’s going to cost money, and we’re going to have to find people.”