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UNE gets Planning Board approval for new health education facility in Portland
The University of New England has been given the green light by the City of Portland to relocate its College of Osteopathic Medicine (COM) from Biddeford to the Portland Campus, a significant step in the University’s plans to train more doctors to meet the state’s demand for health care professionals.
The new state-of-the-art UNE COM facility, to be called the Harold and Bibby Alfond Center for Health Sciences, will allow for a 21% increase in the number of students admitted to UNE COM, and it will bring all the University’s health professions programs onto a single, interprofessional campus — an unprecedented model for a single campus in New England — while facilitating growth of highly demanded undergraduate programs on the Biddeford Campus.
A proposed rendering of the new College of Osteopathic Medicine facility in Portland.
With approval from the city’s Planning Board, the $93 million, 112,000-square-foot facility could break ground as early as next month, with an estimated move-in date of June 1, 2024.
UNE President James D. Herbert, Ph.D., told the Portland Press Herald this transformative project comes at a pivotal time as Maine continues to see shortages in the health care workforce. He said moving the College of Osteopathic Medicine to the state’s largest city — a stone’s throw from its largest hospital, Maine Medical Center — serves as an incentive to keep the college’s graduates in Maine.
“It doesn’t do us any good to train doctors here and then have them move south to Boston,” Herbert told the paper. “We are the workforce engine for the health care workforce in the state.”
Consolidation of the University’s health professions programs will also help break down silos between disciplines, with student doctors working directly with their peers in UNE’s various programs in nursing, dental medicine, pharmacy, physician assistant, occupational therapy, physical therapy, dental hygiene, and social work, among others, in an approach known as interprofessional education (IPE).
The practice teaches students to work together to treat patients as a whole, rather than separate organ systems.
UNE has already established itself as a national leader in the field of IPE, and the University will soon establish a new Institute for Interprofessional Education and Practice as part of the COM relocation plan.
“This campus is going to be unprecedented in all of New England by having this diversity of health care programs on a single geographical footprint,” Herbert said in the Press Herald. “It’s going to change how we train.”
One in three health care professionals in Maine is a UNE graduate, and nearly 4,000 UNE COM alumni serve the citizens of Maine, New England, the United States, and the globe. The new UNE COM facility will allow UNE to increase capacity of each COM class from 165 to 200 students.
The relocation project has received transformative financial support from the federal government — $5 million was awarded in federal omnibus spending in April — and the Harold Alfond Foundation, which in 2020 gifted UNE $30 million for the COM relocation and related projects.
