April

Together with its partners, the BC Patient Safety and Quality Council is encouraging British Columbians to pledge to make one small change to improve the health and social care system leading up to Change Day BC on 15 October 2015. The premise of Change Day is that even seemingly small acts can come together to build a wave of action that contributes to improvements of the health care system.

The provincial Enhanced Recovery After Surgery (ERAS) Collaborative has launched a new website (www.enhancedrecoverybc.ca) to provide resources to support the implementation and improvement of enhanced recovery programs. The website includes tools and templates, an open forum for comments, and webinars.

Dr Kristy Cho, winner of the 2014 J.H. MacDermot writing prize was incorrectly identified as Ms Cho in the print issue of the March 2015 pulsimeter section (BCMJ 2015;57:72). Dr Cho is currently completing her first year of residency in obstetrics and gynecology at UBC. Our sincere apologies for the error.

Research affiliated with several organizations, including the BC Cancer Agency and Simon Fraser University, is featured in the journal Nature as part of a special issue highlighting 20 papers that are the outcome of a 7-year project mapping the epigenome. The project, called the National Institutes of Health Roadmap Epigenomics Program, provides a core set of data, methodology, and infrastructure for studying the role of the epigenome in human health and disease.

The Canadian health care system is frequently (and almost exclusively)[1] compared to its American big brother. Comparisons often draw on radical examples of our southern brethren remortgaging their houses or swimming to Cuba to afford basic medical coverage.[2] These sensationalist stories attempt to highlight the superiority of our socialist utopia to our neighbor’s litigation-heavy and insurance-restricted system.