British Columbia’s first team-based teaching clinic, located at UBC, has opened.

On Friday, UBC announced the newly named MacIsaac Health Building, in recognition of a $40 million gift from Matthew and Natalie MacIsaac, is now open and ready to both treat and teach at once.

The team-based teaching clinic is now accepting patients and can provide primary care for up to 4,450 people.

The teaching health hub combines licensed health professionals and students from nine different health disciplines to learn while providing care. 

The gift from the MacIsaac family has been the largest ever made to a Canadian school of nursing. Besides the clinic, the gift also supports nursing education, research and clinical learning. 

“We are deeply grateful to the MacIsaac family for their visionary, transformational gift to UBC and to the future of healthcare in B.C.,” said UBC President and Vice-Chancellor Dr. Benoit-Antoine Bacon. 

“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 team-based care model combines dietitians, exercise physiologists, family physicians, nurse practitioners, occupational therapists, pharmacists, physiotherapists, registered nurses and social workers.

The MacIsaac Health Building also gets provincial support for the clinic’s staffing, daily operations and program development. The hope is that the centre can test models of care and education for further development at other clinic settings across B.C.

“Many patients live with complex conditions that extend far beyond any single discipline’s scope,” said Dr. Julie Tipping, the clinic’s program director and an assistant professor of teaching in the MacIsaac School of Nursing. 

“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.”