Today, UBC is formally celebrating the newly named MacIsaac Health Building and the historic $40-million gift from Matthew and Natalie MacIsaac, which helped make this brand-new, future-ready hub for health innovation possible.

The celebration is also showcasing the new Team-Based Care Teaching Clinic, BC’s first team-based teaching clinic. Now accepting patients, the clinic will provide primary care for up to 4,450 people.

The clinic brings licensed health professionals together to care for people without a regular provider, while students from nine health disciplines learn alongside them.

The 270,550-square-foot MacIsaac Health Building also houses the MacIsaac School of Nursing, the School of Kinesiology, UBC Student Health and Wellbeing, and Arts Research Commons. Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm) representatives helped shape the building and landscape, which feature works by six Musqueam artists and culturally significant plants.

The gift—the largest ever made to a Canadian school of nursing—supports the building as well as nursing education, research and clinical learning. In recognition, UBC named the MacIsaac School of Nursing and MacIsaac Health Building for the family.

“We are deeply grateful to the MacIsaac family for their visionary, transformational gift to UBC and to the future of healthcare in BC,” said UBC President and Vice-Chancellor Dr. Benoit-Antoine Bacon. “The MacIsaac Health Building reflects UBC’s vision for the future of health education, research and care—one in which people across disciplines learn from one another, advance knowledge and put it into practice to improve health in communities.”

How team-based care works at the teaching clinic

The clinic’s care team includes dietitians, exercise physiologists, family physicians, nurse practitioners, occupational therapists, pharmacists, physiotherapists, registered nurses and social workers. Together, they provide comprehensive primary care while students gain supervised experience in a working clinic.

Provincial funding supports the clinic’s staffing, daily operations and program development, including work to develop and test models of care and education that could be adapted in other clinical settings across BC.

“Many patients live with complex conditions that extend far beyond any single discipline’s scope,” said Dr. Julie Tipping, the clinic’s program director and an assistant professor of teaching in the MacIsaac School of Nursing. “When students deliver care as a team in a real clinical setting, they quickly learn where their own scope ends, where a colleague’s begins, and how much better care can be when those perspectives are combined.”

Regular team meetings, shared care plans and direct introductions between providers help patients move between services while remaining connected to one coordinated care team.

“When a patient tells us what matters most to their health, the team determines the best person for them to see,” said Max Szkarlat, a physiotherapy student at the clinic. “If medical concerns arise, the family doctor and nurse practitioner are there to address them. Seeing that collaboration gives us a model for how we can work together.”

Simulating patient care and studying human movement

Beyond the clinic, purpose-built nursing and kinesiology spaces support hands-on education and research.

In the MacIsaac School of Nursing’s simulation suites, students respond to realistic clinical scenarios using advanced medical mannequins, including infant simulators that breathe, cry, display symptoms and react to treatment.

At the School of Kinesiology’s Balance and Falls Research Centre, researchers and students work with scientists and clinicians in Canada and around the world to study how people maintain balance and mobility. Using virtual reality, motion capture, robotics, force sensors and behavioural assessments, they can safely challenge a person’s balance and measure how the brain, nerves and muscles respond—research that can help improve fall prevention and rehabilitation for older adults and people with neurological conditions such as Parkinson’s disease.

This gift is part of FORWARD, the campaign for UBC, with the promise and potential to advance healthy lives, a healthy planet and healthy societies.