Author: UBC Abbotsford-Mission Family Practice Residency Program

“Pulling out the ‘bad apples’ won’t solve the situation. ‘There’s a system problem,’ Dr. Terry Aldred said, ‘and there’s a way-that-we’re-trained problem.’

According to a 2015 report First Peoples, Second Class Treatment, ‘racism against Indigenous peoples in the health care system is so pervasive that people strategize around anticipated racism before visiting the emergency department or, in some cases, avoid care.’
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‘It does not make it right and I’m not trying to create excuses,’ said Aldred, ‘but as somebody who walks in both worlds, medical students weren’t trained properly in cultural safety and humility.’ Training was aimed at creating confident practitioners who knew their stuff, she said. ‘They didn’t want the soft-spoken, tender-hearted person necessarily.’ She recalls some of her fellow medical students as exceptionally caring and altruistic whose demeanour changed dramatically after going through medical training.

Nearly 10 years out of school, Aldred is helping change the system from within. Besides her primary care practice with Carrier Sekani Family Services, she is site director with UBC’s Indigenous Family Medicine program, managing 10 medical residents in Victoria, Nanaimo and Vancouver. These days, residents get five times more Indigenous health content than Aldred did, and time spent working in Indigenous communities.

‘It’s kind of like changing the tide on a tsunami.’”

More here on Healthcare racism investigation should go beyond “bad apples” to systemic roots, says Indigenous doctor via Rocky Mountain Goat.

For this hackathon, we’re focusing on the theme of team dynamics. We’ve experienced a significant disruption in our ability to gather and meet face-to-face. Our teams flipped overnight to a virtual platform with an increasing reliance on asynchronous communication to accomplish our tasks. Given the dynamic circumstances, what strategies and methods are best in maintaining alignment of our people, our values, and program objectives? What group adaptations have evolved to ensure team success and fulfillment? What can UBC Faculty of Medicine do to support and develop us as faculty members, so that our teams and how we participate on them function as we want them to?

Spend your morning with us innovating and rethinking our paradigms. Prizes awarded for best ideas!

Register now.

CHES distributes a collection of medical education article abstracts to members. “We thank Dr. Gisèle Bourgeois-Law who has created these summaries for the education community at the Island Medical Program. While these articles have a medical education focus, we are using this opportunity to explore the value of such an initiative to our larger CHES community. Article themes include topics such as: feedback and mindfulness, those by local/BC educators, those relevant to a distributed medical program, and those with new ideas. Our aim is to include a variety of quantitative and qualitative research articles, review articles, and concept articles, some of which contain an interesting editorial or commentary. This summary is not meant to be comprehensive, nor to include everything of potential interest.”

These 3 caught my eye:

If you would like to nominate an article for future inclusion or have any questions, please email ches.communications@ubc.ca.

Congratulations to our Abbotsford-Mission Family Practice Residents who won the Lloyd Jones Collins Award for their scholar projects!

Uprooting Mood Disorders in the Fraser Valley: Community gardening as a non-pharmacologic treatment for outpatient anxiety and depression
Drs. Michelle Hanbidge & John Stimson

Food as medicine: An analysis of the health impact of ketogenic diet educational seminars on participants in a community-based family medicine practice
Dr. Rylan Duivestein

You can learn more about Michelle and John’s project here.

For more information, please visit the Women’s Health Research Institute here.

“The BMJ‘s special issue on racism in medicine reflects the working lives of doctors from ethnic minority backgrounds and the healthcare experiences of ethnic minority patients. This edition focuses on race and its impact on health. It is a timely reflection, as we in the UK try to make sense of the societal upheavals which have convulsed the country in recent times, and in which race, racism, and power have come under close scrutiny.”

Learn more here.

We stand in support of our #UBC faculties, programs, and departments that are observing #ShutDownSTEM #ShutDownAcademia #Strike4BlackLives

More here on Statement in support of Black Lives Matter and #ShutDownSTEM via UBC Science.

“The national poll conducted by Abacus Data between the 14^th and 17^th of May 2020 found that almost half of all Canadians have now accessed a physician using virtual care options and they are highly satisfied with the results. Those who connected with their doctor virtually during COVID-19 report a 91% satisfaction rate – 17 points higher than in-person emergency room visits. Moving forward, almost half (46%) of Canadians who had the opportunity to use virtual care since the pandemic outbreak would prefer a virtual method as a first point of contact with their doctor.”

More here on Virtual care is real care: National poll shows Canadians are overwhelmingly satisfied with virtual healthcare via CISION.

I want to strongly encourage that you also check out the CMA survey itself. The data is quite interesting and I think urges us to reimagine a system that supports multiple modes of delivering care.

Warm regards,

Jacqueline

“The problem with race medicine extends far beyond misdiagnosing patients. Its focus on innate racial differences in disease diverts attention and resources from the social determinants that cause appalling racial gaps in health: lack of access to high-quality medical care; food deserts in poor neighborhoods; exposure to environmental toxins; high rates of incarceration; and experiencing the stress of racial discrimination.

You see, race is not a biological category that naturally produces these health disparities because of genetic difference. Race is a social category that has staggering biological consequences, but because of the impact of social inequality on people’s health. Yet race medicine pretends the answer to these gaps in health can be found in a race-specific pill. It’s much easier and more lucrative to market a technological fix for these gaps in health than to deal with the structural inequities that produce them.”

More on Dr. Dorothy Roberts TEDTalk on “The Problem with Race-Based Medicine” here.

“’Long-term care facilities are home to some of society’s most vulnerable—often frail seniors with pre-existing health conditions, including dementia and Alzheimer’s. These seniors depend on their loved ones for social companionship, and right now those usual ways of connection are gone,’ says UBC’s Dr. Roger Wong, clinical professor of geriatric medicine in the faculty of medicine, who is helping lead the new initiative.
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Over the coming months, the Connecting with Compassion team will deliver new iPads to long-term care homes across the province in hopes of facilitating virtual visits and connections among family and friends. The iPads will arrive pre-loaded with videoconferencing programs, like FaceTime, Zoom and Skype, as well as a host of other apps designed to keep seniors engaged. The iPads will also come complete with recorded performances by students from UBC’s School of Music—including harpist Hayley Farenholtz.
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As part of the initiative, UBC medical students based in communities across the province will be playing an active role, volunteering their time to virtually visit and connect with residents in long-term care homes every week.”

Learn more here on “Helping seniors in long-term care combat social isolation during COVID-19” via UBC News.