South Health Campus opens

The biggest hospital in Alberta’s history is beginning to open, with diagnostic imaging and family clinics now treating patients.

Premier Alison Redford, Health Minister Fred Horne, and University of Calgary President Elizabeth Cannon were joined by their colleagues and the media at the South Health Campus (SHC) Thursday for the opening of the first phase. Other services will be phased in over the coming months. The emergency department will open in early 2013.

“These are the first of many milestones that will be celebrated here at the South Health Campus,” said Redford. “The South Health Campus is already enhancing the health-care system in Calgary and southern Alberta by providing new capacity to diagnostic imaging and access to family doctors.”

In a joint initiative between Alberta Health Services and the University of Calgary, with funding from the Government of Alberta, the new teaching clinic will provide Calgarians access to nine family doctors with the capacity to take on 4,000 new patients.

They're open 8:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Monday-Friday and can be reached at 403.956.2300.

The South Health Campus Family Medicine Teaching Centre is the third teaching clinic operated in the city by the university with Alberta Health Services. The others are located downtown at the Sheldon M. Chumir Health Centre, and at the Sunridge location in the northeast (near the Peter Lougheed Centre). The clinics are staffed by numerous family doctors and act as a teaching tool for family medicine ‘residents’ – recently graduated physicians training in family medicine.

“Our teaching sites offer Calgarians access to family doctors who provide comprehensive primary care,” said Cannon. “Along the way, patients have the opportunity to help train future doctors by allowing family medicine residents, supervised by fully qualified doctors, to participate in their care.”