Local leaders gathered for a ribbon cutting ceremony for the new SIU Center for Family Medicine in Carbondale on Thursday.
The new facility is a collaboration between Southern Illinois University and Southern Illinois Healthcare. It houses a medical clinic and will be home to the SIU family medicine residency program and the SIU physician assistant program. Students will learn and practice together, something Chief Resident Sohaib Sajjad says is important for all of them.
"You get to see how other providers manage patients," Sajjad said. "You have various different specialists and doctors that practice differently."
One of the features in the new building are practice exam rooms, which allow PA students to work on simulated patients while being observed and graded by faculty.
PA student Destiny Petrowich says that's something critical for their training.
"So the simulated patients really are the first opportunity that we as PA students have to be with a patient, to act as a physician assistant would," she said.
The practice rooms can be converted to regular exam rooms if the clinic is experiencing high volumes of patients.
The building also has classrooms and an anatomy lab, which features synthetic cadavers used to train students.
