People in the news – a pretty impressive two weeks
Jul 6th, 2012 by Martin Dawes
Starting with the David Snadden. Dave as you may remember was appointed Executive Associate Dean, Education, in the Faculty of Medicine in November last year. In his new position he is providing strategic leadership for all education programs within the Faculty of Medicine. It is good news for family practice to have a family physician in this position. He was a full time family physicians in Beauly in the North of Scotland (picture to the right) for over ten years so he is well qualified to be able to realize the training opportunities good comprehensive primary care can provide at the undergraduate and postgraduate level. The purpose of bringing him to your attention again is that he has just been awarded the 2012 Honorary Medical Alumni Award in recognition of his services to UBC and the community. Congratulations.
Next is a list of very successful family doctors
BC 2012 Community Family Physician Stephen Beerman (Nanaimo)
BC 2012 Family Physician Teacher Joanna Bates (Vancouver)
BC 2012 Family Physician Researcher Wendy Norman (Vancouver)
Congratulations to all – huge commitments of time and energy as well as plenty of scholarly activity have led to these awards. 
I will focus a little on Wendy Norman. She has just won an extraordinary award. A family doctor since 1987 with a varied and dedicated career including Medecins Sans Frontieres she joined the clinical scholar program in 2009 supervised by Janusz Kaczorowski in the department of family practice. In 2010 she gained her first grant, a Sue Harris Research award, and she was off and running. She then undertook a Masters of Health Science Epidemiology. Since then she has had another eight grants including a CIHR grant for over $600,000 all while she had a clinical appointment in the department funding her research time herself in the last two years. This rate of grant success, along with her publications, is enviable for a full time academic let alone a person who only has a small fraction of her time paid to do research. In the fall of last year she applied for and gained a grant-tenure position in the department. This meant that she was now eligible to apply for a “research investigator” award and should she be funded would have an academic position in the department. We have two thirds of our 34 academic faculty as grant tenured whose positions are supported by competitive awards.
This spring she applied to Michael Smith and amongst incredibly tough competition has won a MSFHR Career Investigator Award. 22 investigators from over 100 applicants gained these awards. I am really proud of Wendy in gaining this achievement. Her career demonstrates that there are paths for clinicians to do research, though not easy paths. Congratulations. For more details on her work I would encourage you to look at her research site.
Last but not least is Karim Khan. I won’t repeat the article but just point out that The Lancet is not an easy journal in which to win praise for your scholarly endeavours. Yet Karim has done just that. Follow the link to see the justly deserved praise for Karim
Congratualations to all of you. Family practice is in good hands with role models such as you.
Martin