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“There is risk in taking a new, creative approach — not everything pays off, and some prototypes will fail along the way, but that’s the way the process is supposed to work. To get good results you have to veer from the known path. If you want to get to new places, you have to dive into the unknown. ”
—Coe Leta Stafford, Co-Managing Director of IDEO U

Listen to the podcast on tips for sparking creativity at work!

Hartman (2016) suggests we need a radical transformation of medical education to better prepare learners for the 21st century and to help them transition from the age of information to the age of artificial intelligence. If you veered medical education from its known path what would it look like? What would you add or subtract to the learning journey? Leave your comments below!

In my Blue Sky reboot, I’d add the topics of creativity & innovation; climate change & health (Harvard’s on it!); digital health literacy; gamification & multimedia; nutrition & culinary medicine, and technologies such as artificial intelligence & virtual/augmented reality. I’d also condense all the CanMed Roles to “Educator” and divert 1/2 the Faculty of Medicine’s research funds to faculty development and teaching. Physicians trained as educators would empower both the profession as well as the patient that seeks treatment and counsel (read: Teaching Physicians to Teach: The Underappreciated Path to Improving Patient Outcomes).

Finally, I’d completely revamp Journal Club from a roundtable dialogue on scholarship to a Tinker Space where learners would tackle the research article by attempting to solve the issue via product design, prototyping, and testing. In my mind, the space would look something like below (add a test kitchen for our Dinner Club! because teaching subjects such as nutrition and the culinary arts are key to promoting good health. It’s also a great excuse to invite Chef Michael Smith back to Abbotsford!) Culinary medicine is that perfect intersection that “blends the art of food and cooking with the science of medicine”:

More on Creativity and Medicine:

• Creativity in Management in Family Medicine. (In this Canadian study, “the results showed that more creative residents had a higher quality of management score, a higher number of high-quality options, more options of an interpersonal nature, and a higher proportion of original options”). Would make for a great Resident Scholar Project!
• On Creativity and Innovation: Getting into the Minds of Creative Giants at Family Medicine Forum
• Creativity in Medical Education: The Value of Having Medical Students Make Stuff.
• Preserving Creativity in Medicine.
• Creativity in Medicine: A Burned Out Physician Turns to Art.
• Neurology and the Humanities: Creativity in Medicine.
• Research on Creativity and Aging: The Positive Impact of the Arts on Health and Illness.
• How Arts Education Can Help Create Better Doctors.
• Creative Art and Medical Student Development: Department of Family Practice.

What are your thoughts? Am I completely off? Are you mildly entertained? Or are you as excited as I am to reinvent the path of medical education? If you’re interested in pursuing any of these ideas, please feel free to reach out!

Warm regards,

Jacqueline

I lay ill ; but soon Symmarchus sought me
With a class of a hundred young men,
Whose hundred cold paws have brought me
The fever I lacked till then.

– Ep. v. 9 of Martial (A.D. ?40-130) translated by Raymond Crawfurd

Excerpt from The History of Clinical Medicine (Principally of Clinical Teaching) in the British Isles (1939) written by Humphry Rolleston.

For those Residents interested in sharing their narrative, Resident Doctors of Canada has a call for submissions:

Resident Doctors of Canada is publishing Inside the Lives of Canada’s Resident Doctors, the first anthology of stories about residents’ experiences in medical training. Our goal is to increase our mutual understanding and respect for each other as individuals and colleagues, as well as to enhance public awareness of resident doctors’ important roles in the healthcare system. Sharing personal reflections and narratives will enrich our shared experiences as resident doctors.

Do you have a story to tell? We would love to hear from you! Please view our submission guidelines in more detail.

The deadline for all submissions is February 28, 2019.

“The recognition that art can serve as treatment for patients is growing. Dance and music can help patients with Parkinson’s to overcome their characteristic loss of automated movements. We’ve seen compelling examples of patients using artistic expression—paintings, drawings, books, poetry, music—to provide positive connotations to their disease (fig 1). These include the creativity unleashed by dopaminergic medicine which, if not excessive, can improve the patient’s wellbeing, allowing physicians to exploit this as part of their therapeutic repertoire.”

~ Bloem Bastiaan R, Pfeijffer Ilja L, Krack Paul. Art for better health and wellbeing BMJ 2018; 363 :k5353

Kwéleches, hello and welcome! A big thank you to our Elder Roberta Price for joining us today. Through her narrative, we learned of her resilience, empathy, and healing. We learned that our journey is what binds us and that through our exchange of stories we traverse similar paths and new terrain. She gifted us with her insight and experience and asked that we lead with compassion.

We would like to express our sincere gratitude to Elder Roberta, our Preceptors, our Residents, and all that touch our program for dedicating the time and resources to teach and guide us through the stormy seas and clear skies.    

We send our warmest wishes to you and yours this holiday!
Catch you in 2019!

The Abbotsford-Mission Family Practice Residency Program

Varoon Mathur on Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare – TEDxUBC 2018

UBC Faculty of Medicine 2018: Year in Review.

An app to measure wounds.

Poetry informs his patient care.

Queen’s blind date with knowledge.

Registering medical implants.

Harvard Medical School commits to decarbonizing healthcare.

Endangered Species: Artists on the Frontline of Biodiversity. (A must see!)

BC private clinics win injunction.

Crackdown on sugary, alcoholic drinks.

Fake medical news threatens lives.

Improving health services via design thinking.

Making healthcare more human.

Vaping is now an epidemic in the US.

U of T bans smoking on all campuses.

Traveling with your diet & exercise.

The Stanford Prison Experiment revisited.

Top medical innovations and predictions for 2019!

“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.”
― From Neil Postman’s prophetic book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

Nominations are now open for the 2019 UBC Medical Alumni Association Awards. The UBC MAA needs you to nominate a deserving individual(s) for a Wallace Wilson Leadership or Honorary Medical Alumni Award! This is a fantastic opportunity to recognize your colleagues in the medical community.

Nominations can come from any MD alumnus of the UBC medical program and cannot be awarded posthumously. Deadline for 2019 nominations is Friday, January 11, 2019.

Learn more here.

“The fact that the number one predictor of whether we agree that climate is changing, humans are responsible and the impacts are increasingly serious and even dangerous, has nothing to do with how much we know about science or even how smart we are but simply where we fall on the political spectrum.” ~ Dr. Katharine Hayhoe (TEDWomen Dec 2018)

Last month, the UN released special report SR1.5 on global warming and the US government published the Fourth National Climate Assessment Vol II: Impacts, Risks, and Adaptations in the United States. The Lancet’s independent, global monitoring system also issued in November The Lancet Countdown: tracking progress on health and climate change.

After reading the reports, I began to question how information on climate change is disseminated to the public and if medical education programs and physicians have a role and responsibility to address climate change. If so, what is the role and how is it best exercised in this political firestorm? What are the responsibilities that our family physicians have to be informed on the topic and to educate patients as to the effects of climate change on their health and the crucial services they need?

Interestingly, in The Climate Mitigation Gap: Education and Government Recommendations Miss the Most Effective Individual Actions (2017), Wynes and Nicholas found that “education and government documents do not focus on high-impact actions for reducing emissions, creating a mitigation gap between official recommendations and individuals willing to align their behaviour with climate targets.”

The four actions they found to have the biggest impact were:

• Having one fewer child (which could reduce emissions by 58.7 tonnes of carbon per year, due to the absence of emissions that an extra person would generate over a lifetime).
• Living car-free (reducing emissions by 2.4 tonnes per year).
• Avoiding air travel (reducing emissions by 1.6 tonnes per transatlantic flight).
• Eating a plant-based diet (reducing emissions by 0.8 tonnes per year compared to a diet that includes meat).

Climate change, filtered through the lens of a family physician, may be a topic that one of our UBC Residents would like to pursue as a Practice Improvement Process/Continuous Quality Improvement Project or Resident Scholar Project.

To help you get started, I’ve listed organizations, articles, and resources that caught my attention:

Physicians for Social Responsibility and Global Warming: Climate Change Emergency Medicine Response

A Practical Guide for Physicians and Health Care Workers to Reduce Their Carbon Footprint in Daily Clinical Work (2018) by Maximilian Andreas Storz, MD

Physicians’ Role in Addressing the Issue of Climate Change and Health during their Conversations with Patients (2016) by Alanya Den Boer

Doctors Urged to take Climate Leadership Role (2011) by Fiona Harvey

Emerging Roles of Health Care Providers to Mitigate Climate Change Impacts: A Perspective from East Harlem, New York (2014) by Perry Sheffield, Kathleen Durante, Elena Rahona, MS, Christina Zarcadoolas, PhD

Teaching About Climate Change in Medical Education: An Opportunity (2016) by Janie Maxwell and Grant Blashki

Physicians, Climate Change and Human Health (2008) by Lamk Al-Lamki, MD

For a look at how things break down in our neck of the woods, see Canada’s action on climate change, British Columbia’s Climate Planning & Action, Abbotsford City’s Climate Change Plan , and Mission’s Community and Energy Emission Plan (2012).

Warm regards,

Jacqueline

“Dr. Kendall Ho, professor in UBC’s department of emergency medicine, and his colleagues in the digital emergency medicine unit have developed a classroom-based program to teach students between the ages of 9-14 how to safely navigate and assess health information on the internet. The program, called Learning for Life, aims to encourage kids’ healthy pursuits and reduce their risk of developing chronic diseases such as Type 2 diabetes.” Read more on this launch here.

In addition, Dr. Ho and his team designed a series of teachers’ resources including their Learning for Life Toolkit, instructional samples, student workbook, and comics. The instructional samples encourage students’ creativity by motivating them to think about ways to solve issues and to develop health and wellness strategies. The comics are fantastic and great conversation starters on topics such as sleep hygiene, digital health, and mental health as featured below:   

I see several uses for this material that travel beyond the classroom. If we consider the potential that the patient lounge area and exam room have to teach, then the toolkit and educator resources may be wonderful additions to a physician’s toolbox. Just starting a conversation on a topic can be tough and using these visuals may be one avenue to opening up the dialogue with a young patient. One final thought is swapping the anatomy posters found on the walls of many exam rooms with illustrations that convey a story with meaning, ideas, and solutions.

A big thank you to Dr. Ho and his team for addressing the need to build children’s digital health literacy skills and for designing such a creative platform! More projects from the Digital Emergency Medicine crew here.

Warm regards,

Jacqueline

“As leaders of health and care, we are steering change in a world where the power of hierarchy is diminishing faster and becoming more disruptive… In the dominant approach, power to create change largely comes through positional authority. In the new world, power comes from connection and ability to influence through networks.” ~ Bevan and Fairman

In 2018, NHS England released “Leading Large Scale Change: A Practical Guide” addressing complex health and social care environments. The document provides a detailed account of the process NHS developed as well as their frameworks, methods, and tools used to facilitate and sustain transformation. The focus is on building networks and communities needed to support change and how to mobilize informal power. From creating a climate where everyone can contribute to managing complex dilemmas, the guide deconstructs the concept of change in a very accessible way and suggests action items and resources for readers and leaders to try giving it a go!

Warm regards,

Jacqueline