Message from the Department Head

The department has been incredibly active over the last few months. Issues have ranged from the postgraduate expansion program, undergraduate curriculum renewal updates, and research. Willa Henry and Diana Chang (the recently appointed postgraduate expansion director) have been extraordinarily busy working on how we can meet government targets for expansion. At the latest post graduate meeting of the site directors I was very impressed by the positive attitude all the directors were showing in the face of the requests to take more residents. The meeting of site faculty responsible for evidence based medicine, research and informatics in sites was also extraordinarily positive. We heard ideas of EBM curriculum development from Cam Ross and the willingness to share, develop, and evaluate ideas for improving scholarship in the residency program. The undergraduate students all use one method of critical appraisal of the literature thanks to the input of Ruth Martin. This is a major advance in creating an updated  undergraduate curriculum for EBM. Meanwhile the major renewal of the whole undergraduate curriculum has been put back by one year to ensure adequate time for the whole four years to be completely developed. This definitely takes the pressure of a lot of faculty.

The conference season has started and Family Medicine Forum is looming in a couple of weeks. The BC college meeting was a great affair with BC CFP awards of excellence going to Drs. Steve Beerman (Community Family Physician), Sean Ebert (Rural Family Physician), Wendy Norman (Researcher), Joanna Bates (Teacher) along with Dr. Goulzhar Cheema and Valerie Tregillus for Exceptional Contribution to Family Medicine.  CFPC Reg L. Perkin Family Physician of the Year, Dr. Stan Lubin. The BCCFP was on the same day as the Canadian Diabetes Association. The news from there is that the target for HBA1C is going to be raised to 8.5% for certain groups of individuals. St Paul’s conference is coming up, as is the North American Primary Care Research group meeting. I am pretty confident none will have food as healthy as the Canadian Hypertension meeting. This is the first meeting I have been to where a nutritionist was working so closely with the conference center to ensure that the food was healthy. It just shows it is possible.

Martin