Lorie Shekter-Wolfson, left, George Brown College’s dean of community services and health sciences, is leading the charge to improve the Canadian health- care system with the help of $61.5 million in government funding.

As of September 2011, Toronto’s Waterfront will be home to George Brown’s new Centre for Health Sciences building, which will include a community centre and a residence.

The centre, which Shekter-Wolfson calls a “beacon of health care education,” will house the four schools comprising of about 3,000 full-time students from the nursing, health services management, health and wellness and dental health schools.

She said that the new building will help them increase their intake of students by a third. About 600 new spots will be open for nursing students.

“The biggest increase is in nursing because although the government announced that it’s going to slow down their commitment to funding full-time nursing jobs… research is showing that nursing is entering a huge crisis within the next five years because the average age of working nurses are in their late 40s and nursing is such a physically demanding profession that you won’t find a lot of people working until 65.”

She said that there is going to be a significant exodus of nurses and “if we don’t start increasing our intake, I’m worried about this.”

Shekter-Wolfson said that in addition to creating more spaces for students, the centre is going to be a “purpose-built environment” that will facilitate an interprofessional education framework.

She said the concept of inter-professional eduction, which is when two or more professions learn with, from and about each other to improve the quality of care, originated in England but Canada is now considered one of the leading countries in the field.

She credits the 2002 Romanow Report, which outlined suggestions to improve the health-care system, with setting the stage for the interprofessional education movement in Canada.

“One of the findings was that if we’re going to want changes in the system, we have to ensure that we educate students differently, otherwise, we’ll end up with the same problems.”

Since then, Shekter-Wolfson, who started her career as a social worker and was on the board of directors for Jewish Family and Child in Toronto, has been working to garner support for changing the face of health-care education in Canada.

She said she wanted “to change the curriculum… shifting it so students are aware of more professions and they have exposure to other professions… We’re trying to create opportunities for other students to be exposed in our own controlled applied learning environment to the elements of inter-professional care.”

Shekter-Wolfson, who sits on Health Force Ontario’s Interprofessional Care Strategy Implementation Committee to determine how this framework is to be implemented in the education and health-care sectors, said she has been collaborating with other institutions including the University of Toronto, Michener Institute for Applied Health Sciences and Ryerson University.

She has also worked closely with the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities, Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Infrastructure to get their political advisers to push for George Brown to get the funding to build the centre.

When Waterfront Toronto was approaching institutions about expanding their campuses on the waterfront, George Brown’s leaders presented Shekter-Wolfson’s concept that was based on her years of experience working in the health-care system and outlined the reality that health-care professionals don’t work as well together as they could.

“There isn’t one person out there that will tell you that they didn’t have a story where the left hand and the right hand weren’t aware of each other,” said Shekter-Wolfson, who is the president of the Canadian Association of Allied Health Programs.

She said that this can sometimes lead to mistakes that can negatively interfere with a patient’s health. She added that while health-care students are being educated well, they aren’t being taught to work in teams and learn about each others’ profession.

“If we can teach them to ask the right questions then we’ve done our job.”

She said she met with some internal reluctance to the project because it involves changing the curriculum and practice, but whenever she led with the heart, sharing stories that everyone could relate to, no one could disagree.

“There were barriers that had to do with physical location, and there were barriers that had to do with things such as scheduling. The other key barrier… was that people don’t know how to teach this because it’s an evolving issue.”

But she added that organizations such as Health Force Ontario have been very committed to making her vision a reality.

“They’re not just talking about education but what the system has to do. They’re talking about what the professions have to do differently, what legislation has to be changed to support it – it’s not just one element.”

She said that about a third of the goals are already in works.

“We’ve created courses, we’ve developed projects, we’ve already got a mapping of what we’ve done and what we still need to do,” she said.

“If ever the stars were aligned or there was a perfect storm in a positive sense, it’s now. Because you’ve got the sector, you’ve got government and you’ve got the educators working together like they’ve never worked together before.”