Applicants must be a Canadian citizen or permanent resident. Eligibility for admission to the CBMC is limited to Nova Scotia applicants and will prioritize qualified Nova Scotia applicants with lived experience in rural Nova Scotia communities.

To learn more, visit CBU.ca/medicine

Applications for the Cape Breton Medical Campus class of 2029 (beginning September 2025) will open in June 2024.

You can apply through DAL’s website: https://medicine.dal.ca/departments/core-units/admissions/education-equity/rural-applicant-pathway.html

There will be a separate admissions stream for the Cape Breton Medical Campus. Students will receive the bulk of their training in Cape Breton and rural Nova Scotia. Admissions will be prioritized for Indigenous and African Nova Scotian students, and students from Cape Breton and rural Nova Scotia. The initial class will see up to 30 students in August 2025 to make up the first cohort.

To learn more, visit CBU.ca/medicine

Yes, completion of the MCAT is an admissions requirement; however, there are no MCAT thresholds (minimum scores) for CBMC. You must have an MCAT score completed in the past 5 years to be eligible.

The Rural Applicant Pathway is the admissions entry into the Cape Breton Medical Campus. In addition to being a Canadian citizen or permanent resident of Canada, applicants to CBMC must have lived in rural Nova Scotia for five or more consecutive years including high school and excluding post-secondary education.

For the purposes of this application, rural Nova Scotia includes any community outside of the Halifax Regional Municipality, as well as any community within the Halifax Regional Municipality if the postal code has a zero in the second position (ex: B0J1A2) as they have been designated as rural.

To learn more, please visit Rural Applicant Pathway – Faculty of Medicine.

All questions around admissions can be addressed to Medicine.admissions@dal.ca , including questions about application requirements for the Rural Applicant Pathway and Cape Breton Medical Campus.

Your degree will come from the Dalhousie University Faculty of Medicine.

At the Cape Breton Medical Campus, medical education will be delivered in the new medical sciences building on the Cape Breton University campus. 

The current NSCC Marconi campus will be repurposed to house a large collaborative clinic that will serve the primary care needs of the general public, while also providing new space for clinical training of medical students, and eventually, residents. The Cape Breton Regional Hospital will continue to be utilized as a teaching hospital, as will clinics and hospitals throughout Cape Breton and rural Nova Scotia.

Our Student and Resident Affairs Department can assist CBMC students in finding the living option that best works for them, both on and off-campus.

For support around student living, please email cbmc@cbu.ca.

Following the construction of the new CBMC buildings, we look forward to shifting our focus towards developing new residences for the campus.

Yes. 

By prioritizing engagement with the medical community, CBMC has had incredible success securing highly-skilled, trained educators who will provide top-tier learning experiences for our students. 

The current Dalhousie University Faculty of Medicine curriculum will be delivered at the Cape Breton Medical Campus. For the first two years, students will be receiving the same lectures as classmates in Halifax or the Saint John, New Brunswick campus. In later years, there is more learning off campus, however, we are still following the distributed medical education model developed by Dalhousie University.

To learn more about this model, please visit Undergraduate Medical Education – Dalhousie University

With the new campus, additional residency positions will be aligned with the number of undergraduate medical seats, with positions in family medicine. The resident positions will be based in Cape Breton and rural Nova Scotia.

The longitudinal integrated clerkship (LIC) is a model for a third-year clerkship in which the core clerkship discipline units are integrated into a year-long program based on patient-centered care and continuity of learning, learning environment, supervision and assessment, and patient experiences. New LIC placements will be established for students at the Cape Breton Medical Campus.

We already have a number of individuals who have indicated their interest in serving as preceptors. In collaboration with Dalhousie, CBU has hired a consultant to canvas physicians across the province to ascertain what is needed to take on students, whether that’s administrative support, physical space or housing. With that information in hand, we will address any identified issues.

By accepting an offer, CBMC students agree to a 5-year return of service agreement to practice medicine in a rural Nova Scotia community and a commitment to Family Medicine in rural Nova Scotia as determined by the Provincial Government.

Medical students enrolled at all Dalhousie Medicine campuses, including Cape Breton Medical Campus, are individually responsible for paying the same tuition fees. The 2024-2025 Medicine tuition fee schedule can be found here. Government funding to Dalhousie Medicine to support the delivery of the medical education program at all campuses does not include tuition fees.

• At CBMC, students will have access to comprehensive support from the Student Affairs team which will help learners with issues related to stress and anxiety, personal or family crises, short- and long-term leaves of absence and scheduling accommodations, all with a goal to enable students to be successful in their medical school journey.
• If students are unable to meet the contractual requirements outlined in the return of service agreement, they will be required to repay the funding support to the Minister of Health and Wellness. All prospective students are encouraged to carefully read the return of service agreement which includes payment details and should reach out to physician.resources@novascotia.ca with any questions regarding the agreement.

If you have questions specific to the CBMC experience, please email cbmc@cbu.ca and we will ensure the most appropriate team member follows up with you.

*Please note that questions surrounding application requirements and admissions processes should be addressed to Medicine.admissions@dal.ca.

Cape Breton has a long history of medical education and has had a family medicine residency program since 2005. There are several examples across the country where educating and training physicians in rural areas has resulted in improved physician recruitment in rural areas, including Northern Ontario, New Brunswick and Newfoundland & Labrador.

Part of the University’s Strategic Plan includes a commitment for CBU to bolster the overall health and development of Cape Breton while recognizing the needs in other areas. The plan also includes a commitment to champion the Island’s prosperity, and this initiative will have a significant impact both socially and economically. After all, healthy communities are thriving communities.

A medical campus is a distributed medical education site of an established medical school.

The Cape Breton Medical Campus is one of three sites of Dalhousie’s University Faculty of Medicine, with accreditation as a single medical school. The curriculum will be shared among the campuses, but each one will reflect its unique location, demographics and culture.

To stay up to date with the latest from CBMC, including faculty/staff, admissions, construction and programming, please visit our CBMC Progress Updates page.

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