Ontario's vet college gets a $33 million boost

Sunday, March 20, 2016

by SUSAN MANN

The University of Guelph’s Ontario Veterinary College is undergoing a major $33 million expansion and renovation.

The Ontario government is providing $23 million towards the construction of a new clinical learning building and the renovation the existing veterinary hospital “to provide new space for advanced surgery and anaesthesia,” according to a March 18 press release. Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities Reza Moridi and Education Minister Liz Sandals, the MPP for Guelph, made the announcement. 

The veterinary college already has commitments of $6.5 million in donations for the $10 it’s raising for the project’s costs, a University of Guelph press release says. 

The new learning facility will have modern classrooms and use computer-based case studies, patient simulators, and medical communications labs. 

Ontario Veterinary College dean Jeff Wichtel says the upgraded classrooms will enable the college “to keep up with the way in which students would like to learn and the way we would like to teach students, which is much more hands-on, interactive team teaching.” 

Modern veterinary teaching makes more use of models and simulators rather than using live animals in the early training of students, he says. “It means that when the students first work on live animals they have a much higher skill level.”

The veterinary hospital was built in the 1950s and isn’t “suitable for what we do in there any more,” he notes. 

The project is being carefully staged so as not interrupt student learning or the work being done in the veterinary hospital, he explains. “We’ve identified spaces within the building that we can move into temporarily.” 

Classrooms will be housed in the additional floors being added to the one-storey Lifetime Learning Centre, which was built 10 years ago. It was designed with “this expansion in mind,” he says.

The renovations of the veterinary hospital will begin in June and take about 18 months to complete, Wichtel says. The college is aiming to break ground for the new classrooms construction in September. “That’s probably optimistic but that’s what we’re shooting for.” That construction is projected to be completed within 18 months of its beginning.

There are 480 veterinary students and 270 graduate students at the college, which is Ontario’s only veterinary medical college.

The government funding comes from the Ontario public infrastructure fund of $160 billion being spent over 12 years for projects, such as roads, bridges, transit systems, schools and hospitals. BF