R1 Team (top left to right: Drs. Richard Low, Diane Bosc, Michal Jurkowski, Sahar Shafaq, Casey Hicks, Jas Hans, Clare Chiu, & Michelle Ou)
Hi & Welcome!
We’re the Abbotsford-Mission Family Practice Residency Team based out of Abbotsford and Mission, British Columbia, Canada. We’re passionate about medicine, your educational journey, and delivering the best care to our community. We know you have several choices ahead and we’re here to help you in making the right decision for your future. Learn more about us here!
Italian illustrator twins, Anna & Elena Balbusso’s artwork in praise of all the doctors and health workers engaged in this very hard planetary war against the #covid19#womensart#FridayFeeling via @womensart1
The Scholarly Work in Family Medicine Education Grant supports academic and community-based family physician members of the College of Family Physicians of Canada (CFPC) in leading projects in medical education. This grant funds scholarly work with the intent of advancing family medicine education broadly. Projects that support CFPC educational initiatives will receive special consideration.
The application window opens on December 15, 2020. Applications must reach the CFPC National Office by 4:00 p.m. (ET) on February 1, 2021. Applications must be submitted online. Please refer to this PDF for application requirements.
“Nurses in some Ontario hospitals are not being paid when they are told to go home to isolate due to COVID-19 exposure. If they test positive, they do get paid. But if they test negative, they must still stay home for 14 days without receiving their paycheque.
It’s another blow to morale for frontline medical staff who have been fighting the COVID-19 pandemic for nearly a year. On top of the regular stress of working in healthcare, nurses fear catching the virus, or transmitting it to their families or colleagues. Rafal Fratczak is a nurse at Niagara General Hospital’s inpatient internal medicine unit. After an outbreak was declared on a unit Fratczak had worked on, he was sent home for a 14-day isolation period. He was told he wouldn’t be paid.
…..
Dr. Gupta says the policy of not paying for self-isolation could have the effect of discouraging nurses and others from being upfront about possible exposures, he said.
‘It’s almost a counterproductive measure not to support honesty,’ he said. ‘It’s going to lead to a lot more problems.'”
Ontario nurses no longer getting paid during self-isolation after COVID-19 exposure via CBC.
Dr. Farah Shroff: Eye yoga & relaxation Tuesday, January 19 at 8:00 am As we spend more time on screens, our eyes benefit from care and attention. In this workshop, we will do some overall relaxation exercises and specific eye yoga. Event registration
Dr Shauna Correia: Optimizing Sexual Response Friday, February 5 at 12:00 pm Event registration
Dr Farah Shroff Laughter Yoga Thursday, February 18 at 8:00 am Laughter is a joyful form of health promotion and disease prevention. Laughter yoga combines breath, gentle movement, and laughter for a full belly workout that uplifts. Created by a family physician, Dr Madan Kataria,Laughter Yoga has spread all over the world, improving the mental, physical, and social health status of huge numbers of people. Event registration
Dr Linlea Armstrong: Wellness & Leadership Thursday, February 25 at 12:00 pm Event registration
Dr Farah Shroff: Self-compassion Wednesday, March 3 at 8:00 am Event registration
“This unit is over capacity as cases in the surrounding community climb out of control. To make way, they’ve had to reduce surgeries and create intensive care space in the hospital’s surgical recovery unit.
While mass-vaccination offers distant hope, Spiegelman is concerned that these new strains, especially the U.K. variant, could compound an already troubling trend.
‘It’s way more transmissible and contagious, which is concerning because we know the original virus was very contagious to start off with,’ Spiegelman said. ‘So, if this explodes into our society where our numbers double or triple, that will trickle down to patients dying from it.’
Three UBC faculty of medicine members are recipients of Canadian Association for Medical Education (CAME) Certificate of Merit Awards. The awards recognize and reward faculty committed to medical education in Canadian medical schools.
A special big hug to our own Assessment Director, Dr. Theresa van der Goes of the Family Medicine Postgraduate Program, Department of Family Practice. Dr. Van der Goes’ outstanding accomplishments set her apart as an excellent leader in medical education. Her confident, intellectual approach is key to the successful implementation of ambitious and innovative work at UBC. She inspires us all to be better as she leads by example.
The recipients, Drs. Cary Cuncic, Parvathy Nair and Theresa van der Goes, will be celebrated at the Canadian Conference on Medical Education Virtual AGM on April 19, 2021. More here.
“Medical schools are increasingly called to include social responsibility in their mandates. As such, they are focusing their attention on the social determinants of health (SDOH) as key drivers in the health of the patients and communities they serve. However, underlying this emphasis on the SDOH is the assumption that teaching medical students about the SDOH will lead future physicians to take action to help achieve health equity. There is little evidence to support this belief. In many ways, the current approach to the SDOH within medical education positions them as “facts to be known” rather than as “conditions to be challenged and changed.” Educators talk about poverty but not oppression, race but not racism, sex but not sexism, and homosexuality but not homophobia. The current approach to the SDOH may constrain or even incapacitate the ability of medical education to achieve the very goals it lauds, and in fact perpetuate inequity. In this article, the authors explore how “critical consciousness” and a recentering of the SDOH around justice and inequity can be used to deepen collective understanding of power, privilege, and the inequities embedded in social relationships in order to foster an active commitment to social justice among medical trainees. Rather than calling for minor curricular modifications, the authors argue that major structural and cultural transformations within medical education need to occur to make educational institutions truly socially responsible.”
The COVID-19 vaccines that have been approved by Health Canada are safe, effective and will save lives.
Vaccines do more than protect the people getting vaccinated, they also protect everyone around them. The more people in a community who are vaccinated and protected from COVID-19, the harder it is for the virus to spread.
Two vaccines, the Pfizer vaccine and the Moderna vaccine, have been approved for use by Health Canada.