Abridged from today's T&T
UdeM expanding medical training centre
Published Friday November 18th, 2011
$7-million facility to be completed next August
By Aloma Jardine
Times & Transcript Staff
Med students at the Centre de formation médicale at Université de Moncton will step into a brand new building when they return to their studies next fall.
The university held an official ceremony yesterday to mark the construction of an 18,000 square foot (1,675 square metre) addition to the Pavillon J.-Raymond-Frenette, the one building on campus located on the north side of Morton Avenue. Work on the addition began in July and is expected to be completed by August 2012, in time for students to begin using it during the next school year.
The addition will include study space for students, offices, research and laboratory space and an amphitheatre and will double the amount of space available for the medical school.
The $7-million facility was funded by the province.
UdeM president Yvon Fontaine says the new space is badly needed.
"In terms of our ambition, we were never modest, but we started in terms of our infrastructure, very modestly," he says. "The building that is being used for the program now was an existing building, we kind of recycled it, and it was a small building not built for that purpose. It served us well, but we knew right from the start that eventually we would have to expand."
The students have very limited study space in the current set up and there is no amphitheatre where all students can attend a lecture or presentation simultaneously.
Fontaine says they were able to work with the limited space in the early years of the program because they did not have their full complement of students. The program, which began in 2006, accepts 24 students each year. Now that the full 96 students are at the school, space has become more of an issue.
Dr. Aurel Schofield is the director of the Centre de formation médicale and the associate dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Université de Sherbrooke.
He says the school has seen much development over the past five years, including increased research
Post-secondary Education, Training and Labour Minister Martine Coulombe says with this building all the pieces are in place to assure the future of the study of medicine in French in New Brunswick.
She says the province also wants to support and encourage research in the province in all disciplines.
"Education is at the root of economic development in the province," she says. "With infrastructure like this, that meets the needs of the training centre and is more comfortable for students, it will offer a chance to help increase research in the province, which I believe is necessary."
Fontaine is hoping the new facility will help the university in that respect.
"This also is a springboard for us to grow our research capacity in the health sector," he says. "We want to step to another level in terms of research in the biomedical area."
He expects UdeM to be at the heart of the province's push for more health research.
"I think this university, the potential to grow its research in the next five to 10 years, I think on the health side is very promising," he says.
Personal note - medical education in Moncton has come a long way in a short time.
The U de M program has 96 undergraduate medical students. I am not sure how many post graduate family practice and specialty residents are at the Dumont at any one time, but I would hazard a guess at about 16-20. On the anglophone side, there has been a family practice residency program at the Moncton Hospital for some time, with a total of 12 residents in the program. The Moncton Hospital will also be a base for third and fourth year medical students out of the medical school program at UNBSJ. I think we will have about 16 third and fourth year medical students at the Moncton Hospital. When you throw in elective medical students and specialty residents, I expect that there will be about 32-36 medical students and residents based at the Moncton Hospital at any one time as well.
So, when you total up the francophone and anglophone sides, there should be in the vicinity of 150-160 medical students and residents based in Moncton. 
One thing that is screwy about the medical school building at U de M is that it is at the exact opposite side of the campus from the Dumont Hospital, and if anything, is almost closer to the Moncton Hospital!.
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While it is nice to have new buildings popping up all the time, I hate it when the old ones are neglected to this point.
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