George Brown College to build new waterfront campus, expand health education and research

It's now official - GBC's new waterfront campus has received funding to be built on Toronto's East Bayfront. As reported earlier by the Toronto Star, the new campus will enable us to support continued growth as the GTA exceeds post-secondary education capacity. As the press release states:

Once built, the new campus will be a unifying new home for George Brown’s Centre for Health Sciences, bringing together its many programs currently spread across existing campuses. As a leader in Interprofessional Education, this new expansion is clearly aligned with HealthForce Ontario’s Blueprint for Action on Interprofessional Care. It will also enable the college to train more Health Science workers in response to critical skills shortages. Already among the province’s largest nursing schools, this expansion will allow George Brown to accommodate an additional 1,300 new nursing students by 2015, helping meet the government’s commitment to hire 9,000 nurses and create nurse led clinics.

GBC Research is applying to the Canada Foundation for Innovation for funds to expand the health sciences research space in the new campus. The George Brown College Health Sciences Inter-Professional Online Research and Technology Assessment Laboratory (I-PORTAL) will add a significant and complementary applied research capacity to the GTA health sciences research institutions with whom we work and train health care workers.

In other health sciences news, GBC and Trent University continue to explore a collaboration agreement based in Nursing.