UWindsor's medical education building to open "very soon"
By Hannah Larking
News Editor
September 10, 2008
The University of Windsor’s highly anticipated medical education building will be welcoming 24 new students very shortly, said Brian Mazer, the special advisor to the provost at the university.
Mazer says the new building will be used jointly by the Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry program and by the University of Windsor as a whole. However, only the medical school part of the building will be functioning for the fall semester. “We never intended for classes for the university as a whole to start in the fall,” Mazer explained. “We planned to start using it primarily in January.”
Currently, the medical students only have partial occupancy of the building. While making plans for the building, the university and the board of governors requested a three-storey building to be built, but only anticipated uses for the first two floors. They now intend to schedule additional courses in the top floor as they go through the fall 2008 term.
The building is equipped with two multimedia classrooms for video conferencing with medical students in London, ON and these two rooms are presently operational. The two rooms are essentially mirrors of one another with a control room in the middle. Each holds 50 students. One will be used primarily by the medical school and the other primarily by the university. “The reason we haven’t moved the medical students in yet is because the technology involved with these rooms requires training for faculty and staff that will begin soon,” Mazer said. Right now the students are doing their video conferencing out of the Centre for Teaching and Learning.
In addition to the two multimedia classrooms, there are 10 small group learning suites that will also be shared between the medical school and the university. “They’re good rooms for graduate and upper year seminars because they seat about 12 or so students,” explained Mazer.
On the second floor, there is also a gross anatomy lab and a virtual anatomy lab. The virtual anatomy lab will have two giant projectors at the back and will allow students to view the screen through glasses in 3D. With this technology, students will be able to see a heart in three dimensions and watch as the camera moves through veins and different parts of the heart.
There is also a suite on the second floor called the clinical skills laboratory. The suite contains 10 clinical skills examining rooms and two tutorial rooms. “These clinical skills examining rooms look like an average doctor’s office examining room, with blood pressure machines and stethoscopes,” Mazer said. The exercises completed in these rooms will be done both independently by medical and nursing student, but there will also be what is known as inter-professional education in which the rooms will be shared jointly by the two student bodies.
“In addition we foresee the possibilities, for sure, of other disciplines such as clinical psychology and social work for example, who may want to be part of that inter-professional education and who may also have their own use for that clinical skills lab,” Mazer added.
The clinical skills laboratory will also be available and used for interviews in medicine as they do in London, but it can also be used for the Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs), which are the clinical skills tests that nurses, doctors and other clinicians all have to pass for professional qualifications. The laboratory is set up such that it could host those clinical skills tests for other disciplines as well.
Students will also have access to a multipurpose laboratory which will be divided into two with a portable wall. Half of the room will be used by the medical school as a computer laboratory, but also as a histology lab, said Mazer. Since microscope use has become essentially obsolete, the program did not buy any. “It’s all done digitally now, and that’s where they’ll be doing that work on slides and those sorts of imaging issues,” Mazer explained. The other side of the room will be used by the university as a computer instruction facility.
The main feature of the medical education building is actually found in the atrium between it and the Toldo Health and Education Centre, where a three-storey living wall will stand. The wall will be made up entirely of plant growth, with water running down it. In addition to its aesthetic value, the living wall will also serve as a natural air filter. As the air goes through the atrium, the roots of the plants and the membrane that they are in will filter things out of the air. From an energy perspective it is also beneficial because it means that the air being circulated is already clean, and thus, in the summer, hot air from the outside does not need to be pulled in and cooled, or, in the winter, cold air from the outside does not need to be pulled in and heated. “The building was designed to be as energy efficient as possible,” said Mazer.
Even the windows are strategically placed on each of the east, west and south sides (the north side connects to the Toldo Health and Education Centre) of the building to provide natural light and save energy.
The medical education building committee hopes that its energy saving techniques will earn it certification in Leadership in Energy and Environment Design (LEED), making it the first building on campus to have that qualification.
For more information on the medical education building, or to view photos, please visit www.uwindsor.ca/meb
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