M`SIAN KING VISITS MCGILL UNIVERSITY HEALTH CENTRE

By Sharifah Nur Shahrizad Syed Mohamed Sharer

MONTREAL, Sept 21 (Bernama) -- Malaysian King Tuanku Mizan Zainal Abidin visited
the McGill University Health Center (MUHC) at the Montreal General Hospital,
Monday.

On hand to greet the Malaysian King were MUHC's Chief Executive Officer Dr
Arthur Porter, its director Dr Vassilios Papadopoulos and Director of Business
Development, MUHC Research Institute, Dr Costas Karatzas.

During the 90-minute visit, Tuanku Mizan was briefed on the Super Hospital
project by Dr Porter and on the centre's research programme by Dr Papadopoulos
followed by an overview of the hospital by construction expert Yanai Elbaz.

Tuanku Mizan is currently on a special task visit to Canada in conjunction with
the brain gain programme organised by the Sultan Mizan Royal Foundation (YDSM),
in which His Majesty is the chairman.

The MUHC is a network of teaching and community hospitals and is affiliated with
McGill University.

A teaching hospital, the MUHC provides tertiary and quaternary care to patients
from across Quebec and elsewhere, as well as primary and secondary care and
trauma emergency services to adults and children in the Montreal region.

The seven clinical missions of the MUHC are: Pediatric Medicine (The Montreal
Children’ s Hospital), Medicine, Surgery, Neurosciences (The Montreal
Neurological Hospital), Women’s Health, Mental Health and Cancer Care.

Meanwhile, on the sidelines of the visit, several memorandums of
understanding (MoU) were signed between three Malaysian institutions of higher
learning namely Universiti Teknologi Mara (UiTM), Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM)
and the Sultan Zainal Abidin University (Unisza) and the MUHC, MUHC Research
Institute and the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning, McGill
University.

Among areas of co-operation inked under the MoU include arrangement to a short
and long term faculty exchange, graduate students exchange and teaching staff
exchange.

They also agreed to do collaborative research and discovery, learning, teaching
and engagement, more specifically research collaboration in cardiovascular
science, cancer medicine, gerontology, geriatrics, reproductive physiology,
genomic medicine and tocotrienols.

Representing the UiTM was its Vice-Chancellor Prof Dr Sahul Hamid Abu Bakar
while Unisza was represented by its Deputy Vice Chancellor Prof Dr A. Manaf Ali
and UPM by its Vice-Chancellor Prof Nik Mustapha Abdullah.

McGill was represented by its Vice-Principal (Health Affairs) Dr Richard I.
Levin, who is also the Faculty of Medicine Dean.

Concurrently UiTM also inked a separate MoU with MUHC on the development of a
super modern technology hospital while Unisza and MUHC agreed on the planning
and development of an advanced modern teaching hospital in Malaysia.

Commenting on the MoU, Dr Karatzas said it would be the base to start a real
work by the staff and students.

"Starting from a scientific curiosity, this has become a network for various
activities for students, programmes, scientific directions, common ground
proposals and I think our imagination is the only limit of how far this
interaction can go," he told Malaysian media at the event.
-- BERNAMA