I’m still waiting to find out whether I’ll be accepted as a patient, at a multi-disciplinary Pain Management Unit (PMU). The wait is nerve-wracking, and it’s always on my mind (cue the old song lyrics!), so I thought it would be interesting to tell you a bit about the home of this PMU today.
Let’s start with some background, for anyone who’s not familiar with this gorgeous city; Montreal. It’s sadly always under construction constantly dealing with an ageing infrastructure, but it definitely has a lot of European-style charm ,-)
We have several universities this city, two of which have medical schools; McGill University, and the French-language Université de Montréal. Each of them operates several different hospitals, called university health centres. We’re lucky to have two separate – very large – university hospital centres here.
The one I’ve been referred to is the Montreal General Hospital (MGH), one of the principal hospitals of the McGill University Health Centre (the MUHC, called the CUSM in French). The MUHC includes several different hospitals, healthcare facilities, and research institutes throughout the city and even some of its suburban areas.
In addition to medicine, McGill has schools of nursing, physical and occupational therapy, psychology, and more. It also offers specialized healthcare programs like ‘Public Administration and Health Services Management’.
There’s also a high level of research in other sciences, throughout this University, which also impacts medicine and healthcare. McGill University’s primary teaching hospitals include the:
- Montreal General Hospital (MGH)
- Royal Victoria Hospital (RVH)
- Jewish General Hospital (JGH)
- St. Mary’s Hospital (SMH, usually simply called “St. Mary’s”)
Its medical research programs extend beyond these hospitals, to include the:
- Genome Centre
- Goodman Cancer Centre
- Lady Davis Research Institute
- McGill Life Sciences Complex
- Research Institute of the MUHC
At its teaching hospitals, there are always large numbers of students and trainees. I’ve been told that the MUHC has about 200 new medical students each year, added to their 1,000+ medical residents and more than 2,500 people working in medical research. In many ways, it’s like a small town – scattered through different locations across the Island of Montreal!
But there’s more. The MUHC is world-class hospital centre, so they run clinical (medical) fellowship programs; doctors can come from all over the world to learn specialized skills at MUHC hospitals. Fellows are already doctors, who’ve chosen to spend an extra year or two in supervised learning – while also treating patients at the MUHC.
And then there are students from other areas of healthcare; nursing, occupational and physical therapy…
All in all, it sounds like the kind of place at which I’d want my pesky rare disease to be treated. So I’m truly hoping that I’ll be accepted as a patient at the PMU, at the MGH, within the MUHC. Wish me luck!
References
McGill University, Department of Medicine. Accessed 21 Sep 2017. Web:
https://www.mcgill.ca/deptmedicine
McGill University, Faculty of Medicine, Office of Admissions. Admissions – by the numbers. Accessed 21 Sep 2017. Web:
https://www.mcgill.ca/medadmissions/applying/admissions-numbers