jjablkowski's blog

North America is in the midst of an overdose emergency that is having devastating effects, including among youth under 30 years of age.

A hospital, a school, a community centre, a park, a museum, a research institution, or any other public facility in BC that bears the name of a physician reveals the impact that doctors have in our society well beyond the day-to-day practise of medicine. This struck me when I was reading the review of Geoff Mynett’s Service on the Skeena: Horace Wrinch, Frontier Physician in the May 2020 issue of the BCMJ.

Dr Hilary Robertson (ME|FM Society of BC) and Dr Luis Nacul (BC Women’s Hospital Complex Chronic Diseases Program) invite physicians to complete a short 5-minute survey as part of a community engagement project about patient and clinical stakeholder experiences with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME; also called chronic fatigue syndrome) in BC.

When the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic on 11 March 2020, I found myself with unexpected time on my hands as surgeries were cancelled to augment capacity at Vancouver General Hospital in the event of a COVID surge. I leveraged my longstanding research collaboration with UBC engineering sciences and issued a call-to-action with former students, Dr Philip Edgcumbe, a UBC radiology resident and biomedical engineer, and Mr Alex Waslen, a UBC engineering student, to come up with an idea for a low-cost ventilator to address the anticipated worldwide shortage.

Originally called Dominion Day, Canada Day is a statutory holiday that celebrates the unification of three North American British colonies. On 1 July 1867 the British North America Act joined New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Upper and Lower Canada (now the provinces of Ontario and Quebec), creating the unified Dominion of Canada. Today the country is made up of 13 provinces and territories.