PEI’s new med school will rely heavily on technology

CHARLOTTETOWN, PEI – Simulation rooms will be an important part of the University of Prince Edward Island’s new medical school when it opens. Currently under construction, the school provided local journalists with a look at the plans earlier this month, and outlined the importance of technology in educating a new cadre of physicians, nurses and other healthcare professionals.

“When it opens, it is going to be the most state-of-the-art medical education facility in the country,” said Dr. Preston Smith (pictured left), dean of the UPEI faculty of medicine.

UPEI’s faculty of medicine building in Charlottetown is being constructed at a cost of about $91 million. The building will incorporate teaching space for 20 local medical students, but will also house teaching space for the faculty of nursing and for students in other faculties such as paramedicine, psychology and kinesiology.

Tammie Muise (pictured right), director of the new clinical learning centre, which will be housed on the fourth floor of the new building, said the new building will be equipped with 10 simulation rooms, including a brand-new immersive simulation room, which will incorporate projections of a variety of locations.

“That room has projectors on three walls … It comes programmed with hundreds of different places. It could be the back of an ambulance, it could be emergency rooms, it could be anything. It could be the beach,” Muise told local reporters.

Muise said the new faculty of medicine will acquire a variety of mannequins – ranging from those resembling infants to “geriatric mannequins.”

“They breathe, they talk, they can create any scenario that we program them to do,” she said.

The university also plans to recruit flesh and blood humans to stand in as standardized patients, to help train medical students. Muise estimated the university may need to hire as many as 100 casual employees, starting in the winter of 2025. The new building will have teaching space incorporating these trained standardized patients on the third floor.

Most day-to-day lectures for students will be taught via video link by Memorial University faculty.
“It is classroom-to-classroom technology. This is not anything like what you might do at home on Zoom or on MS Teams,” Smith told reporters after the tour. “It is actually two networked classrooms where a student has a push-to-talk mic in front of them. Both classes become part of a whole.”

Initially, UPEI will operate as a satellite campus of Memorial University’s faculty of medicine, although there are plans for UPEI to offer a joint degree with MUN.

Smith said remote lectures are a common feature of satellite medical school campuses throughout Canada.

He also said the new medical faculty building will be an “inter-professional health education facility” that will have teaching space for UPEI’s nursing, psychology, paramedicine and kinesiology programs.

The second floor of the new building will house a new multi-disciplinary medical home, which will be operated by Health P.E.I.

Health P.E.I. has been establishing a network of medical homes across P.E.I. since 2021. The homes operate as clinics with a team of medical professionals, often including physicians, nurses, nurse practitioners, physiotherapists and other allied health professionals.

UPEI’s medical home is expected to be the largest in the province and will take on a patient load of 10,000 people. It is also expected to be a teaching resource for medical students.

Smith said Health Canada has begun a national project to fund educational opportunities that teach students to provide primary care in team-based settings.

“This is (a) right on time model where our students are going to be able to witness team-based primary care right in the same building where they are going to class.”

Source: Saltwire