Increased seatings?

[snowpea]

I was talking to a friend a few days back, and he told me that UBC is increasing their number of seatings, doubling by 2004. I don't doubt that the seatings are going up due to the doctor shortage, but doubling within 2 years seems a bit much. What have you guys heard about this?

[wham]

check this out:

www.publicaffairs.ubc.ca/...01-08.html (http://www.publicaffairs.ubc.ca/mr/mr01/mr-01-08.html)

[not rex morgan]

Doubling isn't much at all. From stats that were kicked around the faculty over the past few years, apparently we really need to triple the number of people admitted to fill the doctor shortage. There is quite a number of physicians planning to retire in the next few years. Combined with the number of docs we lose to other countries and provinces, we really do need the dramatic increase in the number of physicians we train. The problem is that as of right now, we don't have the infrastructure to train so many people. Our class size was increased by eight last year. That was how many seats they were able to add b/c of the lack of physical space to put people, and the number of instructors available. They are building a new teaching complex, which is due to be built by 2004. BC has always depended on physicians coming from out of province. Even when the school opened, they did not have enough seats to fullfill the amount of doctors needed, hence the use of docs trained in other provinces. As BC is becoming less attractive to physicians, due to low fees and the doctor shortage that exists, leading to longer hours than desired, we really need to become more self-sufficient in training our own physicians.

[Jyh1]

But the fact that UBC med's weird/behind-the-door admissions policy and its arrogant attitudes do not help either. It is turning many qualified applicants away to out-of-province or American med schools. And I don't know if they want to come back to BC and find for the low fees given to greater Vancouver docs.

[not rex morgan]

Yup. I totally agree with you. UBC does turn down tons of qualified applicants. This is a problem. I honestly don't know how they pick. I've seen so many wonderful, and bright people turned away, it turns my stomach. I do think part of the problem lies in the low number of admitted applicants. When ranking grade averages, the difference of 1% off of the average can really hurt you. If they get tons of applicants with competitive applications competing for a small number of seats, it sets up a wacky attention-to-detail kind of admissions process. The more spots, the less important seemingly arbitrary differences in scores will become.

[Ian Wong]

I think UBC is actually one of the better medical schools as far as the admissions process goes. From what I understand, UBC has been quite responsive to questions, which speaks a lot as the admissions department is extremely small, and is busy trying to cope with an ever-increasing number of applicants.

UBC also has the most extensive admissions statistics on the web that I've been able to find for any Canadian medical school, and certainly that opens them up to additional scrutiny. However, the fact that they have publically made this information available is a big step in my mind.

As far as the expansion goes, this is all subject to government funding. The expansion is slated to begin in 2004, and will consist of "off-site" medical schools in Victoria and Prince George. The big difficulty is integrating these students into the current UBC curriculum, which alone took many years to develop. The obstacles are simple. UBC's anatomy labs, histology labs, physiology labs, pathology labs, whatever, are all based on either the UBC campus or at VGH. The faculty who teach these courses are also all based in Vancouver. Therefore, how can we guarantee that the off-site med students will receive an equivalent education when all of the current resources are based in Vancouver.

That's a large part of what the internal system here at UBC is working on, to resolve these points before the deadline of 2004.

Ian
UBC, Med 3

[yingw]

Yes, UBC is looking to increase the number of seats in the medical school. Its big plan is to have 24 seats each at both UVic and UNBC in 2004 (also increasing the number of seats at UBC by the same number that year). The seats would increase by increments of 24 every year following.

[123felony]

Just curious how you got any concrete info about the seats at UBC. I thought they hadn't made any decisions yet?

[maniac]

Any chance of UBC upping the number of seats (even by a few) for Sept 2003? Anything beyond that may be out of my educational life time (I'll be 38 by then!)

[helmet33]

There will not be any increase in seats until 2004. The reason for this is that there is no room in the lecture halls for any more students.

[BC guy]

there will be an increase of 24 seats to each site: UNBC, UVic, UBC....in 2004

[not rex morgan]

We just had a coordinator from UNBC sit in on our PBL tutorial this morning. Looks like they're setting the infrastructure in place.

[BC Guy]

further to that.......add 24 extra seats every year after that till the number reaches 200 at UBC....