Author: UBC Abbotsford-Mission Family Practice Residency Program

Government of Canada
Public advisory: Acetaminophen is a recommended treatment for fever and pain during pregnancy

Issue: Health Canada currently maintains that there is no conclusive evidence that using acetaminophen as directed during pregnancy causes autism or other neurodevelopmental disorders. Acetaminophen is commonly used to relieve pain and reduce fever. It has been used safely by millions of Canadians for decades, including during pregnancy and while breastfeeding. Acetaminophen is a recommended treatment of pain or fever in pregnancy when used as directed. It should be used at the lowest effective dose for the shortest duration needed. Untreated fever and pain in pregnant women can pose risks to the unborn child.

What you should do:

• Continue to use acetaminophen for pain and/or fever during pregnancy, as directed. Always follow the directions on the label.
• Do not take more than the recommended dose. Taking too much acetaminophen can cause harms including serious harm to your liver.
• If you are pregnant or breastfeeding, talk to your health care provider if you have questions about the use of any medications.
• Contact a health care provider if:
  • pain lasts more than 5 days; or
  • fever lasts more than 3 days.

What Health Canada is doing:

• Health Canada’s advice is based on robust, rigorous assessments of the available scientific evidence. Any new evidence that could affect our recommendations will be carefully evaluated.
• Health Canada monitors the safety of all medicines authorized for use in Canada, including acetaminophen. All Canadian non-prescription acetaminophen products already carry clear warnings about safe use during pregnancy and breastfeeding, as well as the risk of serious liver injury if too much is taken.
• If new scientific evidence demonstrates a risk, Health Canada would take action to update labels, inform health care professionals, and provide advice to Canadians.

Learn more about the safe use of acetaminophen and potential health risks to make informed decisions.

Teaching With AI: Reflections From our Dawn Patrol Series

I had a fascinating early-morning conversation with our UBC clinical preceptors about what happens when AI tools, especially scribes, enter our clinical learning spaces. So many questions came up about how the introduction is shifting the dynamic in patient care. Three key takeaways stood out:

🔹 Voice & Accuracy Matter
Clinicians note that AI-generated notes don’t reflect their own style or reasoning. These tools often “fill gaps” with information never said, which can distort the record and drive unnecessary tests and investigations. They’re also much longer and less focused. How do we prepare medical learners to build tools that amplify their voice and clinical reasoning rather than overwrite it?

🔹 Prepare for a New Patient Dynamic
Patients increasingly arrive with ChatGPT-style interpretations of their labs and expect explanations for why certain tests weren’t ordered or to clarify AI’s output. This shifts the power dynamic in the room. How can we equip clinicians and learners to respond transparently and confidently when patients bring AI into the conversation?

🔹 Patient Consent, Privacy & Ethics
From signage to informed consent, we must clearly communicate when AI is used in documentation, how data are stored, and what biases or commercial pressures may influence these tools and their use. How do we educate and onboard patients around the use of AI in their care?

For me, the central question remains: how do we make AI an ally that supports our clinical thinking and teaching, rather than one that quietly reshapes the clinician’s voice and patient narrative?

Join us for our next session on Coaching Clinical Reasoning in the Age of AI
Friday, November 21, 2025
0700-0800
I’ll be fowarding out the invite and link in the next week!

~ Jacqueline

“Dr Welsh: This journey really began for me when I was a junior medical student on my pediatrics rotation. I’m walking down the hall, and before I get to the room where I’m supposed to see a patient, I can hear harsh coughing. I go in the room, and there’s a 7- or 8-year-old little girl. It’s obvious she’s breathing hard. I can see her using her accessory muscles of ventilation. I hear her coughing and then I smell for the first time the odor of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a common organism that affects the lungs of people with CF. I hear from her and her parents about all the things she can’t do and how much of her day is spent with a variety of different therapies.

The sobering part was when we left the room because then my attending told me that she wouldn’t make it to her teens. If she did make it to her teens, she almost certainly would never make it out of her teens. There are certain patients that are burned into your memory. That little girl is burned into my memory.”

How Cystic Fibrosis Went From Fatal to Treatable via JAMA.

Background: Obesity is a complex, chronic, stigmatized disease whereby abnormal or excess body fat may impair health or increase the risk of medical complications, and can reduce quality of life and shorten lifespan in children and families. We developed this guideline to provide evidence-based recommendations on options for managing pediatric obesity that support shared decision-making among children living with obesity, their families, and their health care providers.

Methods: We followed the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation (GRADE) approach. We used the Guidelines International Network principles to manage competing interests. Caregivers, health care providers, and people living with obesity participated throughout the guideline development process, which optimized relevance. We surveyed end users (caregivers, health care providers) to prioritize health outcomes, completed 3 scoping reviews (2 on minimal important difference estimates; 1 on clinical assessment), performed 1 systematic review to characterize families’ values and preferences, and conducted 3 systematic reviews and meta-analyses to examine the benefits and harms of behavioural and psychological, pharmacologic, and surgical interventions for managing obesity in children. Guideline panellists developed recommendations focused on an individualized approach to care by using the GRADE evidence-to-decision framework, incorporating values and preferences of children living with obesity and their caregivers.

Recommendations: Our guideline includes 10 recommendations and 9 good practice statements for managing obesity in children. Managing pediatric obesity should be guided by a comprehensive child and family assessment based on our good practice statements. Behavioural and psychological interventions, particularly multicomponent interventions (strong recommendation, very low to moderate certainty), should form the foundation of care, with tailored therapy and support using shared decision-making based on the potential benefits, harms, certainty of evidence, and values and preferences of children and families. Pharmacologic and surgical interventions should be considered (conditional recommendation, low to moderate certainty) as therapeutic options based on availability, feasibility, and acceptability, and guided by shared decision-making between health care providers and families.

Read more on Managing obesity in children: a clinical practice guideline via CMAJ.

Artificial intelligence has arrived in medicine, whether we are ready or not. Medical students and residents are already experimenting with AI tools, and patients are beginning to ask about them and their use in the clinical setting. For faculty, this raises urgent questions: How do we prepare the next generation of physicians to work alongside this technology? How do we teach our learners to think critically, reason ethically, and not outsource their judgment to algorithms?

This fall, Abbotsford-Mission is launching a two-part Faculty Development online series “Dawn Patrol: Artificial Intelligence”, designed to help educators navigate these questions with confidence. Each session focuses on practical teaching strategies, case examples, and hands-on discussion about how to guide learners through this new frontier.

Session 1: Teaching with AI

Friday, September 19, 2025
0700-0800

Description:
This foundations/introductory session explores how generative AI is already entering the medical learning environment. Faculty will learn how residents and students are using AI, consider the risks and opportunities, and practice ways to guide learners in applying AI responsibly while maintaining clinical reasoning and professional judgment.

Learning Objectives:

• Identify common ways learners are engaging with AI in medical education and clinical reasoning.
• Practice strategies to help learners use AI as a tool while avoiding overreliance, misinformation, and bias.

Session 2: Coaching Clinical Reasoning in the Age of AI

Friday, November 21, 2025
0700-0800

Description:
This advanced session focuses on how AI is reshaping clinical reasoning and decision-making. Faculty will examine case examples where AI can both support and mislead learners. The session will emphasize coaching strategies, feedback techniques, and ethical teaching approaches that ensure residents build sound judgment alongside digital literacy.

Learning Objectives:

• Analyze how AI tools can both enhance and hinder diagnostic reasoning in clinical settings.
• Apply coaching and feedback techniques that help learners integrate AI outputs into safe, ethical, and evidence-based clinical reasoning.

AI will not replace the role of thoughtful educators, but it will change the landscape of how we teach and how learners think. By engaging early, faculty can shape how residents integrate AI into their clinical reasoning, not as a shortcut, but as a tool that complements judgment, compassion, and professionalism.

The “Dawn Patrol” series is our way of leaning into the sunrise of a new era in medical education. Together, we can make sure our residents are wise navigators and interrogators of the technologies ahead.

Catch you soon!
~ Jacqueline

*NEW | GenAI in Teaching and Learning: A One-Week Online Intensive Course
November 3–10 | Asynchronous Canvas Course & Two Synchronous Sessions 
Explore the fundamentals of AI, examine its impact on assessment and academic integrity, and engage with real examples from UBC faculty and students.

Generative AI in Teaching and Learning Series

• Supporting Student Learning with AI
  August 26 | 12:00 pm–1:30 pm | Online
• Using GenAI to Articulate Your Teaching Approach
  August 28 | 10:00 am–11:00 am | Online
• Exploring The Changing Landscape of GenAI Tools and Models in Teaching and Learning
  October 2 | 12:00 pm–1:00 pm | Online
• Rethinking Assessment in the Age of Generative AI
  October 7 | 12:00 pm–1:00 pm | Online
• The Why and Whom of Your Course Design: Using GenAI to Clarify the Purpose of Our Teaching
  November 25 | 12:00 pm–1:30 pm | In-person
• Designing Learning Activities that Incorporate Generative AI

December 2 | 12:30 pm–1:30 pm | Online

GenAI Maker Sessions

• GenAI Maker Session: Creating Teaching Materials with Generative AI
  August 27 | 10:00 am–11:30 am | Online
  September 23 | 12:00 pm–1:30 pm | Online

Weekly GenAI Studios: August 20 | September 3 | September 17 | Online

This morning, I had the opportunity to lead an academic session with incoming family medicine residents on one of the most pressing issues in modern healthcare: bias and confabulation in clinical AI tools.

We explored:
+ Real-world cases of AI bias, such as how LLMs alter triage and diagnostic suggestions based solely on patient demographics.
+ Confabulation traps where AI fabricates confident-sounding (but incorrect) medical guidelines.
+ Interactive bias testing: residents input identical chest pain cases into multiple AI tools, tweaking only the patient’s background to examine how different platforms analyze and articulate the patient’s management.
+ Ethical and legal dilemmas: including what happens when a chatbot contributes to chart notes, and whether disclosure is required.

We closed with this question:
+ What safeguard will you commit to using in your own practice to reduce the risk of AI misinformation entering the patient record?

Teaching AI literacy is about clinical discernment, ethical awareness, and training tomorrow’s physicians to engage AI with both curiosity and caution. Grateful to this next generation of residents for their sharp thinking and thoughtful engagement!

Best,

Jacqueline

Join UBC this November for a dynamic, in-person conference packed with practical insights from experienced professionals currently in the field—our first live event since 2019! Explore a wide range of timely topics including job opportunities, work–life balance, practice management, college complaints, billing strategies, navigating Pathways, and more. Don’t miss the chance to connect with colleagues and potential employers at our networking reception and job fair. We can’t wait to welcome you back!

Sat Nov 29, 2025
UBC Robson Square
800 Robson Street Vancouver, BC

To learn more about the event or register, please click here.

Hi Team!

Excited to be facilitating two sessions at the 2025 CHES Celebration of Scholarship hosted by the UBC Centre for Health Education Scholarship.

October 22, 2025
Robert H. Lee Alumni Centre, UBC
Round Table Discussion (8:30–9:15am)
“DocBot 101: Making Sense of AI Before It Makes Sense of You”
Co-facilitated with Dr. Meera Anand, this interactive session invites educators and researchers to explore how we can prepare learners to critically engage with AI before it defines the terms for them.

Oral Presentation (2:15–3:15pm)
“Swipe Right on Clinical Reasoning: Med Students Date the Future (It’s AI)”
I’ll be sharing insights on how generative AI is reshaping clinical reasoning and what this evolving relationship means for medical students and educators.

Grateful to CHES and UBC CPD for supporting meaningful dialogue in health professions education. Looking forward to connecting with colleagues who are navigating and shaping this rapidly changing space and technology.

If you’re interested in attending, register here for the event.

Best,

Jacqueline

Research and Reflections on Teaching: A Medical and Health Education Series (R&R Series)

Title of Webber Lecture: What’s love got to do with teaching? Embedding humanity into our teaching to spark transformation and joy
Webber Lecturer: Katie Lee Bunting, Department of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy, UBC
Date: Friday, September 12, 2025
Time: 8:30am – 1:00pm (PST) 
Location: Hybrid+ (various in-person sites across the province and virtual access available for the Webber lecture)

NOTE: This event is for all faculty who teach in the health and medical programs in the UBC Faculty of Medicine.

Join us for this half-day hybrid+ event exploring the transformative power of teaching with love in health professions education. Through the Webber Lecture and local discussions, we’ll reflect on key dimensions of love as a pedagogical practice and explore how compassion and connection can be meaningfully integrated into your teaching. Connect with colleagues from across the Faculty of Medicine at in-person sites throughout the province, where breakfast and lunch will be provided. For those unable to attend in person, the Webber Lecture will also be available remotely from 9:00 – 10:00 am.

Learning Objectives
By the end of the session, you will be able to:

• Articulate the relevance of teaching with love in health professions education
• Describe key dimensions of love as a pedagogical practice
• Identify two implications to spark transformation and joy in your teaching relationships

Register here.