SWAG��Ƶ

The SWAG��Ƶ has been given the green light by the City of Portland to relocate its College of Osteopathic Medicine (COM) from Biddeford to the Portland Campus, a significant step in the University’s plans to train more doctors to meet the state’s demand for health care professionals.

The new state-of-the-art SWAG��Ƶ COM facility, to be called the Harold and Bibby Alfond Center for Health Sciences, will allow for a 21% increase in the number of students admitted to SWAG��Ƶ COM, and it will bring all the University’s health professions programs onto a single, interprofessional campus — an unprecedented model for a single campus in New England — while facilitating growth of highly demanded undergraduate programs on the Biddeford Campus.

With approval from the city’s Planning Board, the $93 million, 112,000-square-foot facility could break ground as early as next month, with an estimated move-in date of June 1, 2024.

SWAG��Ƶ President James D. Herbert, Ph.D., told the this transformative project comes at a pivotal time as Maine continues to see shortages in the health care workforce. He said moving the College of Osteopathic Medicine to the state’s largest city — a stone’s throw from its largest hospital, Maine Medical Center — serves as an incentive to keep the college’s graduates in Maine.

“It doesn’t do us any good to train doctors here and then have them move south to Boston,” Herbert told the paper. “We are the workforce engine for the health care workforce in the state.”

SWAG��Ƶ has already established itself as a national leader in the field of IPE, and the University will soon establish a new Institute for Interprofessional Education and Practice as part of the COM relocation plan.

“This campus is going to be unprecedented in all of New England by having this diversity of health care programs on a single geographical footprint,” Herbert said in the Press Herald. “It’s going to change how we train.”