Photo Courtesy EverythingGP Staff

By Tanner Smith

Post-Secondary

Alberta government announces a million dollar funding for NWP

Jan 26, 2023 | 4:52 PM

The Alberta government has announced $1 million in funding to four post secondaries across Alberta, one of them being the North Western Polytechnic.

The other three schools receiving the $1 million funding consist of, The University of Alberta, The University of Calgary, and the University of Lethbridge.

The plan for these funds is to create rural medical training centers, in hopes of training people close to their homes, which will increase medical staff retention in rural areas. While also giving more opportunities for these rural post-secondaries to leverage partnerships with bigger schools such as the U of A and U of C, creating more opportunities for youth.

Minister of Advanced Education, Demetrios Nicolaides says they have been listening to the people, and know in rural areas medical staffing shortages are a common problem.

” I think this is a clear demonstration that the government of Alberta is listening very closely, and working to come up with innovative and collaborative solutions, and I think there is some real potential to the model of creating these (rural) training centres.”

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Nicolaides adds he hopes rural Albertans can see this announcement and have hope for their communities. ” I hope folks feel listened to, I think we have been listening carefully and we do try as a government to listen to what Albertans from every corner of our province need and something that we have heard quite a bit about was we have to do more to recruit and retain doctors in all the communities in our province outside of Calgary and Edmonton.”

He says the end goal for this project would be for rural students to not have to travel to Edmonton or Calgary to get the training to become a doctor.

However, these funds are “just to get the ball rolling” and for the schools to see if the roral training centers are a mode of education that would work, nothing is set in stone.

As of right now, the only schools in Alberta that offer Doctor training is the University of Alberta and the University of Calgary.

Nicolaides says any youth seeing this announcement, should get excited, ” I think it gives them something to keep an eye on and something to explore, and if there’s Highschool students out there who want to become a doctor one day, or Junior High students it’s definitely an initiative to pay close attention to as the ultimate goal would be they are able to be trained as a doctor (in the peace region)”

This funding is just the latest from the Alberta government into health care and post-secondary, most recently signing a new agreement with the Alberta Medical Association that includes $15 million annually to support physician recruitment and retention for practitioners who work in under-served areas.