Today@Dal

If you want to see how health care is poised to change in Nova Scotia, take a look inside the new $38.5-million facility that is home to Dalhousie University’s Collaborative Health Education Building.

Inside, there is a 200-seat classroom and smaller seminar rooms, a library and learning commons, group study areas, and specially designed home, rehabilitation and hospital areas to mimic real-life scenarios.

And it’s here, officials say, where thousands of students — including future nurses, doctors and dentists, as well as social workers, pharmacists and physiotherapists — will learn together in ways designed to improve health care for all Nova Scotians.

“We all win,” William Webster, Dalhousie’s dean of the faculty of health professions, said Tuesday as visitors waited to tour the five-storey facility, described as the first of its kind in Atlantic Canada.

It’s a dream come true but several years in the making for Webster, whose vision for the inter-professional learning centre was recognized at the building’s grand opening.

The need for this kind of co-education and training among health-care providers is not a new concept, he said.

As far back as 2002, it was included among the recommendations of a federal report by Roy Romanow on the future of Canada’s health care.

“If health-care providers are expected to work together and share expertise in a team environment, it makes sense that their education and training should prepare them for this type of working arrangement,” Romanow wrote at that time.

Webster said the building will provide more opportunities for students “to improve collaboration and quality of care.”

Dalhousie president Richard Florizone said training health professionals together becomes more important as care becomes more complicated.

He said the university’s “bold and ambitious project” provides the chance to change the culture of care.

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