Emily Plihal
Local Journalism
Initiative Reporter

An exciting new opportunity for northern Alberta students hoping to attend medical school will be gracing Grande Prairie starting in the 2025-26 academic year.

University of Alberta and Northwestern Polytechnic are partnering to offer 30 seats in a medical program, catering to students from rural Alberta. The goal of the Northern Alberta Medical Program (NAMP) is to fully prepare graduates for family medicine and general practice positions to address primary-care needs in rural, regional, and Indigenous communities across Alberta.

Physician and Regional Academic Lead Dr. Richard Martin says learners will have the opportunity to complete their U of A training closer to their support network and will help to increase doctor numbers where they’re needed most.

“This will open in August 2025,” he says. “Essentially, this is one medical program being offered by the U of A where the students will be sited in more than one place. The majority of the students will be in Edmonton, and now a portion of that same class will do all of their medical school in Grande Prairie.”

The goal of the program is to train doctors where they are needed most in the province. Martin says it’s no secret there’s difficulty finding a family doctor in many areas in the province, and the program is meant to address those shortages.

“The hope is that this will open learning opportunities for people to discover and appreciate what generalist practice is about,” he says.

“One of the dire needs for the health system is family doctors and for specialists in Northern Alberta. There are studies that say, where people learn strongly influences where they will set up their career and what they will do with their career,” he adds.

Programs will take place at Northwestern Polytechnic’s School of Health at the Grande Prairie Campus and adjacent Health Education Centre (HEC). The HEC is co-located within the new Grande Prairie Regional Hospital and is a leading-edge facility that has 40,000 square feet of teaching, learning, research, and administration space.

Students in both Edmonton and Grande Prairie will receive the same lectures at the same time, ensuring the same material is being taught to all students simultaneously.

The program is funded by the Government of Alberta, Alberta’s Advanced Education Minister Rajan Sawhney said in April that $224.8 million was pledged to launch two Rural Medical Education Program Training Centres, one at Grande Prairie, the other at Lethbridge.

“Albertans deserve access to timely medical care in every corner of our province,” said Sawhney at a press conference in April.

“Advanced Education is committed to increasing support for Alberta’s medical schools, along with significant support encouraging more physicians to live and practise in rural settings.”

Pre-requisite for applying to the program is a degree already obtained, a specific level of score on the Medical College Admissions Test, and a threshold score on an emotional intelligence test called CASPer. As long as an applicant has achieved those bars, they can apply to the medical program.

“From those candidates we will choose from that pool who we feel are a good fit and would want to interview,” says Martin.

“Typically, the MD program will interview 25 to 30 per cent of all applicants who apply. From that group there is a component of people who fit in a rural suitability index. This will be a way to level the playing field for people who grow up in smaller places where they may not have the same academic or extracurricular advantages as someone in a metropolitan area.”

Martin explains there will also be a scoring system based on where the candidates were raised, with rural candidates receiving more points dependent on where they were raised and educated. The farther from a major centre, the higher the score will be.

“It does make a difference in the desire of those people to go back to those spaces to work. The tag line for the program is Recruit Local, Retain Local,” he adds.