PORTLAND, Maine —
A groundbreaking ceremony was held at the University of New England’s Portland Campus to celebrate the start of construction on the Harold and Bibby Alfond Center for Health Sciences.
The facility will be the new home for UNE’s College of Osteopathic Medicine which is currently in Biddeford.
The relocation of UNE’s College of Osteopathic Medicine will mean that all of UNE’s health science programs will be on the Portland campus.
“This is going to allow us to train more doctors, more nurses, more dentists, more health professions in general, and also to train them in an integrated collaborative model so that they learn to work as teams as opposed to as discrete disciplines,” James Herbert, president of the University of New England, said.
With the construction of the Harold and Bibby Alfond Center, UNE plans to increase their class size from 165 students to 200 which Herbert said will be important to the healthcare industry in Maine.
“We desperately need more doctors as well as more dentists, more nurses, more other health professionals, and that’s what our aim to do here is. We’re going to build this facility state-of-the-art, "Herbert said. "It’s going to be bigger than our existing facilities [and] allow us to train more healthcare professions for the state of Maine and for all of the region, in fact.”
The construction of the Harold and Bibby Alfond Center for Health Science is expected to be finished by the summer of 2024.
The project was made possible by a $30 million gift from the Harold Alfond Foundation.
For more details on the project and a tour of what the Harold and Bibby Center for Health Science will become, click here.
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