“Delivered through the Nova Scotia Health Authority, the program aims to break down systemic barriers that Black women often face when navigating the health-care system, according to Natalie Johnson, the program’s team lead and registered dietitian.
‘They’re able to come here and let some of those walls down, [be] able to open up about things that they may not be able to open up with a health-care provider who doesn’t get their experience as a Black woman,’ she said.
MacKinnon said she’s working on healing both physically and psychologically from experiences of racism and discrimination she’s endured throughout her life. But within the traditional health-care system, she said clinicians rarely acknowledged how those experiences affected her overall health.”
Read more on How this team is transforming health care for African Nova Scotian women via CBC News.
ABSTRACT: Addressing barriers to cervical cancer screening as a public health priority in British Columbia requires innovative approaches. Community-based health promotion initiatives like Papapalooza connect the public with low-barrier cervical cancer screening and accessible health education, offering inclusive, celebratory, and trauma-informed Pap test experiences through pop-up events.
To determine whether patients support Papapalooza as a strategy to reduce screening barriers, we administered 354 pre-Pap surveys and 309 post-Pap surveys to 533 Papapalooza attendees at five events held between March and June 2023. Identified barriers included inaccessible primary care, provider-related factors, and personal factors. Surveys showed increased knowledge and comfort accessing and understanding the importance of screening, with 93.8% of post-Pap survey participants “very likely” to attend another Papapalooza.
Community-based health promotion is an acceptable means of connecting patients with important screening, while creating meaningful opportunities to enhance health literacy.
“This is not about a minor lapse in safety, it’s about a company that gives pedophiles powerful tools to prey on innocent and unsuspecting kids. The trauma that results is horrific, from grooming, to exploitation, to actual assault. In this case, a child lost her life. This needs to stop.” ~ Alexandra Walsh, Partner at Anapol Weiss via Anapol Weiss
Roblox looks like digital LEGO, but the risks are now big enough that attorneys general, researchers, and child protection advocates are sounding alarms.
Investigators using child avatars have repeatedly found sexualised content, grooming behavior, and harassment inside Roblox experiences, even with safety tools turned on (Revealing Reality, reported in The Guardian, 2025). The report also found the avatar belonging to the 10-year-old’s account could access ‘highly suggestive environments’ and another “test avatar registered to an adult was able to ask for the five-year-old test avatar’s Snapchat details using barely coded language”
Screen shows the user’s correspondence pressuring the victim to complete a series of self-harming challenges. Note: “Messages are from ‘anonymous’ in Shapchat.” Media segment clip via WLBT.
Parents and several US states have sued Roblox for safety issues and making it too easy for predators to contact children (Kentucky Attorney General, 2025; Louisiana Attorney General, 2025; Texas Attorney General, 2025). A single plaintiffs’ firm (Anapol Weiss) reports it has filed 12wrongful-death suits against Roblox, one explicitly involving a 13-year-old girl’s suicide after alleged extremist grooming; other suits involve different forms of exploitation. NSPCC and other child protection groups now list Roblox alongside social media when they brief parents about online risk (NSPCC, 2022).
So this is no longer a niche concern. For clinicians and parents, Roblox belongs in routine conversations about mood, sleep, and safety.
The warning signs and suggestions below are adapted from WHO and APA criteria for problematic gaming, systematic reviews on cyberbullying and adolescent mental health, and media-use guidance from the American Academy of Pediatrics, Canadian Paediatric Society, and NSPCC.
Children: Changes in Behaviour & Stress
These behavioural changes may appear in a child who is heavily engaged on gaming platforms:
More irritable or tearful, especially when asked to log off
Staying up late to play, trouble falling asleep, or nightmares
Slipping grades, incomplete homework, loss of interest in offline activities
Withdrawing from in person friends, relying mainly on gaming “friends”
Hiding screens, constant headphones, refusal to play in shared spaces
Learn more in these symptoms via the American Psychiatric Association, via the WHO, and via The Canadian Centre for Child Protection.
Ideas for Parents & Guardians
Play once, then set rules together. Ask your child to show you their favourite games and who they play with.
Use the safety tools. Turn on parental controls, restrict chat and friend requests, limit spending, and keep devices in shared spaces when possible (Roblox Trust and Safety, 2025; NSPCC, 2022).
Anchor Roblox inside a family media plan. Protect time for sleep, schoolwork, exercise, and offline friends. The American Academy of Pediatrics has simple family media plan tools that can be adapted to any home you can access here.
Make disclosure safe. Explain to your child that If something weird or scary happens on their gaming platform to inform you because this information can help you keep them safe.
Three Questions Every Trainee Can Ask
You can integrate a digital media use conversation into a psychosocial history in under a minute:
“What games or apps do you use most, is Roblox one of them?”
“Who do you usually play with, people you know in real life or mostly people you only know online”
“Has anyone ever said or done something while playing the game that felt uncomfortable or scary”
A “yes” to that third question is your signal to slow down, explore, document, and involve safeguarding if needed.
It’s important to understand that these platforms, such as Roblox, are social environments that can shape a child’s mood, sleep, sense of safety, and self-worth. As the NSPCC has highlighted, many parents underestimate what actually happens in these online spaces, while children often struggle to talk about what they see and experience. Our job, as clinicians and caregivers, is to stay curious, ask specific questions about gaming, and notice changes in behaviour, sleep, appetite, or school engagement. When we pair open conversations with early mental health support, we provide children a reliable, attuned adult who is watching out for them.
The UBC Department of Family Practice is saddened by the passing of Dr. Marko Yurkovich, a beloved clinical instructor, and alumnus of our Postgraduate Residency Program, on October 4th, 2025.
Dr. Yurkovich pursued his medical training at the University of British Columbia. He completed the Family Practice Postgraduate Residency Program at the Vancouver-Fraser Site from 2014 to 2016, where he returned as a clinical instructor in 2018.
Dr. Yurkovich founded Genetica Medical & Wellness Centre, where he welcomed and mentored countless UBC medical students and residents. As a true leader in primary care, he was instrumental in advancing initiatives that deepened continuity of care and strengthened team-based practice across the community. He was a beloved teacher, mentor, colleague, and friend, whose unwavering passion for patient-centred care shone through every interaction. His team continues to honour his legacy through their dedication to teaching, compassion, and service to the Downtown West End community he so passionately served.
“We, at the Vancouver Fraser Family Practice Site, remember and honour our former resident and colleague, Marko, following his courageous battle with cancer,” says Raquel Feswick, Site Coordinator, on behalf of the Vancouver-Fraser Site. “His commitment to teaching and his advocacy in the community made a meaningful impact. Marko was a valued member of our community and we will miss him dearly. Our thoughts are with his family and loved ones.”
The Marko Yurkovich Colorectal Cancer Foundation was established to commemorate Dr. Yurkovich’s mission to raise awareness, drive research, and advocate for early onset colorectal cancer. He will be missed.
Tailoring the guide to support the facilitator before, during, and after the debrief (this includes sample phrases that can be used in the moment).
A QR code that links users to references and relevant literature, contact information, and supportive resources such as additional phrases to assist in complex debriefing scenarios.
Coming soon: video examples of clinical event debriefings, highlighting best practices and opportunities for improvement to support new facilitators, as well as a workshop template and lesson plan to support training.
We are hoping that users can go to the link for the download, as with future revisions this will assure they have the most up to date content.
First, thank you to all that joined us at UBC’s Centre for Health Education Scholarship (CHES) Celebration of Scholarship!
Dr. Meera Anand and I led a roundtable discussion titled “DocBot 101: Making Sense of AI Before It Makes Sense of You.” Our goal was to explore how we can prepare learners to critically engage with artificial intelligence before it begins defining those terms for us.
Below is a brief summary of what we gathered from our dialogue.
We began by asking participants to choose one word that captured their perceptions and experiences with AI in health professions education. Their words painted a landscape of complexity and contradiction:
These reflect the promise, expectations, and discomfort of a technology reshaping how we teach, learn, and make decisions in both clinical and academic spaces.
What We Heard from Educators: Participants described learners using AI for summarizing literature, interpreting research, drafting emails, grammar correction, and assessment shortcuts. Some found AI slowed them down due to editing demands. Concerns emerged around students growing reliance on its use for creativity and ideation, yet most agreed AI is now embedded, unavoidable, and must be taught.
Preparing Faculty for the AI Era: Faculty are testing AI in their teaching, particularly for case development, and observing its implementation in hospitals, including Vancouver Coastal Health: VCH AI Hub.
When asked how to prepare faculty for AI’s growing presence, key ideas surfaced:
+ Create formal spaces for dialogue and training. + Develop institutional policies to guide staff and learners. + Use AI to teach ground-truthing, identify confabulations, and strengthen digital literacy. + Integrate AI into professionalism guides to clarify boundaries and etiquette. + Teach how AI scribes and transcription tools err. + Include prompt engineering and assignment design that mitigates over-reliance and academic dishonesty.
The takeaway: educators and administrators share a responsibility to equip learners with the frameworks, skepticism, and confidence to engage with AI responsibly and reflexively.
Learn more about the CHES Celebration of Scholarship here.
When we talk about Artificial Intelligence (AI) in healthcare, our minds often go to diagnostic tools, scribe assistants, or chatbot-based triage systems. But there’s another sector that has been living with AI’s risks and rewards for much longer: cybersecurity. Recently, I attended a lecture by cybersecurity strategist Dr. Craig Jarvis on the growing use of AI in digital defence. His insights translate remarkably well to our clinical context because, at its core, both cybersecurity and healthcare depend on trust, accuracy, and human oversight.
Let’s look at some of the lessons medicine can borrow from AI in cyber defence.
1. AI Can Help but Only If Humans Stay in the Loop
In cybersecurity, automated systems monitor threats, detect anomalies, and even block attacks. But when something unexpected happens, a human expert still needs to interpret, intervene, and decide.
In clinical practice, the same applies. AI tools can summarize patient notes, flag abnormal results, or even draft assessments — but they don’t understand context, patient nuance, or social determinants. We must always ensure “the clinician stays in the loop.”
“Speed is valuable, but not at the expense of human control.”
2. Reduce Toil, Not Thinking
In IT, AI is praised for reducing “toil” or the repetitive, low-value work that consumes time and mental energy. In medicine, the same promise is appealing: fewer administrative burdens, quicker charting, streamlined information retrieval.
But the key is toil reduction without cognitive erosion. If AI saves time, that time should be redirected toward deeper clinical reasoning, patient connection, or teaching moments and not simply faster throughput.
3. The System Is Only as Safe as Its Weakest Prompt
One cybersecurity slide Dr. Jarvis shared reported that 1 in 80 AI prompts carries a high risk of exposing sensitive enterprise data.
In healthcare, that translates to:
Be mindful of what information you input into AI tools.
Avoid typing identifiable patient data into any non-approved system.
Remember that AI retains patterns and once entered, data may not be fully private.
Clinical AI safety begins with data awareness at the prompt level.
4. Diversity Matters: No Single AI Does It All
Cybersecurity systems rely on multiple forms of AI:
Machine learning to detect patterns
Generative AI to summarize or report
Agentic AI to automate tasks and responses
In family medicine, this diversity principle also holds. One model may excel at summarizing notes, another at generating patient education materials, and a third at supporting evidence retrieval. Integrating these tools thoughtfully ensures resilience and balance, not dependence on a single system.
5. Guard Against “Inflated Expectations”
Dr. Jarvis highlighted the case of Cylance, a once-hyped AI cybersecurity company valued at over $1 billion later sold at a massive loss when its promise outpaced its performance.
In healthcare, inflated expectations can be equally dangerous. AI is powerful, but it’s not a replacement for judgment, empathy, or context. Adopting AI responsibly means piloting, evaluating, and refining tools before scaling much like any new clinical guideline.
Bringing It Back to Practice
If we think like cybersecurity professionals, we can reframe how we approach AI in medicine:
Cybersecurity Principle
Clinical Analogue
Human-in-the-loop oversight
Clinician supervision of AI recommendations
Patch management
Regularly update clinical AI tools and policies
Threat detection
Identify AI misuse, bias, or data leakage
Governance frameworks
Clear clinical and ethical accountability
The Bottom Line
AI can help us practice smarter, not just faster, but only if we approach it with the same discipline, skepticism, and care that cybersecurity experts apply to digital defence.
As family physicians and educators, our role is to ensure that AI augments, not replaces, the human connection at the heart of care.
Trust the technology, but verify the outcome and always with compassion and clinical judgment.
Just a reminder that the CFPC has released a series of sample questions (September 2025) that may be useful in your preparation for exams. In this mock exam, you’ll note the new menu-style questioning that the CFPC has recently adopted. If you have any questions regarding the SAMP or SOOs exam, click here.
The UBC Faculty Development Teacher Certificate Program welcomes faculty who teach and assess in the MD Undergraduate Program and Postgraduate Medical Education Program, across all sites.
Program Goal & Structure
The Teacher Certificate Program (TCP) aims to equip teachers in medical education with the basic knowledge and skills to teach effectively. TCP is divided into two programs:
TCP 1: Foundational Teaching is designed to cover core teaching and assessment competencies for those who teach in the MD Undergraduate Program (MDUP) and Postgraduate Medical Education Program (PGME).
TCP 2: Complimentary Topics with a Clinical Teaching Focus provides additional topics that continue to explore important teaching concepts. While all faculty teaching in MDUP and PGME are welcome, please note there will be emphasis on the clinical teaching environment.
The two programs are entirely separate, with no prerequisites, and can be completed in any order.
Each track (TCP 1 & TCP 2) consists of five sessions on topics outlined below delivered by experts. Sessions are delivered on Zoom unless specified. When you have completed all five sessions in a series, a completion certificate will be issued. If you miss a session this year, not to worry, we will likely have another session the following year!
Family Medicine Residency Site: Abbotsford-Mission 