UBC has opened the MacIsaac Health Building, a newly named teaching clinic that is accepting patients and can provide primary care for up to 4,450 people in B.C.
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The University of British Columbia has opened a new teaching clinic housed in the newly named MacIsaac Health Building, a move intended to combine patient care with hands-on training in a team setting. UBC announced Friday that the centre is now open and ready to “both treat and teach at once,” and it is accepting patients as part of British Columbia’s first team-based teaching clinic model.
UBC says the clinic can provide primary care for up to 4,450 B.C. patients. The approach brings licensed health professionals together with students from nine different health disciplines, allowing care teams to deliver services while trainees learn in a real clinical environment.
The MacIsaac Health Building is named in recognition of a $40 million gift from Matthew and Natalie MacIsaac. UBC said the donation is the largest ever made to a Canadian school of nursing, and it supports not only the clinic’s operation but also nursing education, research and clinical learning.
UBC President and Vice-Chancellor Dr. Benoit-Antoine Bacon framed the opening as part of a broader health education and care strategy. “We are deeply grateful to the MacIsaac family for their visionary, transformational gift to UBC and to the future of healthcare in B.C.,” Bacon said. He added, “The MacIsaac Health Building reflects UBC’s vision for the future of health education, research and care — one in which people across disciplines learn from one another, advance knowledge and put it into practice to improve health in communities.”
The clinic’s team-based care model includes a range of health disciplines. UBC said the centre combines dietitians, exercise physiologists, family physicians, nurse practitioners, occupational therapists, pharmacists, physiotherapists, registered nurses and social workers.
UBC also said the MacIsaac Health Building receives provincial support for clinic staffing, daily operations and program development. That backing is designed to help the clinic function as both a care site and a teaching hub, with resources aimed at maintaining its day-to-day delivery and building education and training programs.
The clinic is also intended to serve as a testing ground for how care and education can be structured and scaled. UBC said the centre’s hope is that models of care and education developed at the site can be tried and adapted at other clinic settings across B.C.
The clinic’s program director, Dr. Julie Tipping, said the team model reflects the way many patients experience health problems that do not fit within a single professional scope. “Many patients live with complex conditions that extend far beyond any single discipline’s scope,” Tipping said. She added, “When students deliver care as a team in a real clinical setting, they quickly learn where their own scope ends, where a colleague’s begins, and how much better care can be when those perspectives are combined.”
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