Education/training
York expands faculty of healthThere's more to York University than subway extensions. Take the new Faculty of Health that officially opened July 1. DAVID CHILTON |
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 [ 2006-08-23 ] |
Under one roof -- figuratively not literally -- will be kinesiology and health science, health policy and management, nursing and psychology.
Prof. Sheila Embleton, vice-president academic, says the university had been asking itself for years what it could do to make health more visible at York and bring together people from the various branches of the discipline.
"(The Faculty of Health) is about bringing people together and making things more visible, especially at the graduate level," Embleton says. "Students felt that they just couldn't really do some of the things they wanted to do in health. They were sort of forced into science or forced into social science and (had) no way to really get this kind of interdisciplinary take on things."
The new Faculty of Health will comprise departments - or "academic units" in university speak -- from the Schools of Kinesiology and Health Science, Health Policy and Management, Nursing and a merger of two psychology departments from the Faculty of Arts and the Atkinson School of Liberal and Professional Studies.
Some of the methods to study health and social phenomena in the new faculty will range from experimental and epidemiological techniques to clinical case studies, oral histories and ethnographic observation. Research will focus not just on hospitals and clinics, but also on communities, homes, schools and the global economic environment.
Embleton, a professor of linguistics in addition to her job as vice-president academic, says the Faculty of Health will handle about 6,000 undergraduate and graduate students this year, who were admitted under the former setup. Next year, she continues, the Faculty of Health will recruit students under its own banner.
There won't be any new programs offered in the new faculty this year, either, Embleton says, but its establishment will inevitably mean expansion, especially for graduate programs. It is also expected that the Faculty of Health will get its own buildings, although Embleton concedes they are some way off. She also makes clear that the Faculty of Health is not a Faculty of Medicine to train doctors.
"York does want to eventually get a medical school, dependent, of course, on so many things -- like money. If we were eventually to have a med school, this (new faculty) is a good base, but if we never had a med school this would still be a good thing to do."
Leading the new faculty is Harvey Skinner, its first dean and a psychologist who specializes in public health, behaviour change and the use of IT to improve public health. Skinner, recruited from the University of Toronto, takes over Sept. 1. York begins its academic year Sept. 6.
Embleton says the Faculty of Health will cost York about $900,000 a year in net new money.
Some of those expenses will be met from the sale of the Southlands, some York campus property purchased by a developer.
Michaela Hynie, associate chair in York's Department of Psychology, sits on the planning committee for the Faculty of Health. She says the new faculty won't mean as much visibility for the merged psychology departments as it will for others under the new umbrella because health is only one part of the discipline. The "big impact" will come from the signal the Faculty of Health sends to students that York can offer them opportunities to pursue their individual interests, Hynie says.
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