Re: The subspecialty of adult infectious diseases

Issue: BCMJ, vol. 64, No. 6, July August 2022, Page 247 Letters
By: Brian Conway, MD, FRCPC

It was a pleasure to read Dr Chow’s perspective on the subspecialty of adult infectious diseases in British Columbia [BCMJ 2022;64:155-159]. I met him as a trainee in 1986 and I can attest to the fact that he is one of the founding fathers of our specialty in Canada and a mentor to many of us.

In his Table 2, I would like to point out an omission to his summary of the geographic distribution of adult infectious diseases services in BC. I am the medical director of the Vancouver Infectious Diseases Centre in downtown Vancouver. Our three physicians and three nurses (and other support staff) are dedicated to the development and evaluation of systems of care for inner-city residents living with HIV, HCV, and other chronic medical conditions, including cellulitis, endocarditis, and osteomyelitis, to name a few. We offer services in both French and English. We also have a novel “community pop-up clinic” model, conducted once a week at selected single-room-occupancy buildings in the inner city, interacting with men and women (many with untreated HIV and/or HCV infection) who are often disengaged from care.

Our team congratulates the BC Medical Journal for highlighting the importance of the infectious diseases community in our province. Following in the footsteps of Dr Chow’s pioneering work to develop our specialty, it is a privilege to have developed our centre to serve the most vulnerable among us.
—Brian Conway, MD, FRCPC
Vancouver Infectious Diseases Centre

This letter was submitted in response to “The subspecialty of adult infectious diseases in British Columbia: A personal perspective.”

hidden

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Brian Conway, MD, FRCPC. Re: The subspecialty of adult infectious diseases. BCMJ, Vol. 64, No. 6, July, August, 2022, Page(s) 247 - Letters.


Above is the information needed to cite this article in your paper or presentation. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommends the following citation style, which is the now nearly universally accepted citation style for scientific papers:
Halpern SD, Ubel PA, Caplan AL, Marion DW, Palmer AM, Schiding JK, et al. Solid-organ transplantation in HIV-infected patients. N Engl J Med. 2002;347:284-7.

About the ICMJE and citation styles

The ICMJE is small group of editors of general medical journals who first met informally in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1978 to establish guidelines for the format of manuscripts submitted to their journals. The group became known as the Vancouver Group. Its requirements for manuscripts, including formats for bibliographic references developed by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), were first published in 1979. The Vancouver Group expanded and evolved into the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), which meets annually. The ICMJE created the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals to help authors and editors create and distribute accurate, clear, easily accessible reports of biomedical studies.

An alternate version of ICMJE style is to additionally list the month an issue number, but since most journals use continuous pagination, the shorter form provides sufficient information to locate the reference. The NLM now lists all authors.

BCMJ standard citation style is a slight modification of the ICMJE/NLM style, as follows:

  • Only the first three authors are listed, followed by "et al."
  • There is no period after the journal name.
  • Page numbers are not abbreviated.


For more information on the ICMJE Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals, visit www.icmje.org

BCMJ Guidelines for Authors

Leave a Reply