Fok wins J.H. MacDermot Prize
The BCMJ Editorial Board is pleased to present Mark Fok, a fourth-year medical student at UBC, with the 2007 J.H. MacDermot Prize for Excellence in Medical Journalism. This cash award of $1000 is granted annually to the best UBC medical student article of the year. Mr Fok’s winning paper, “Work hours, sleep deprivation, and fatigue: a British Columbia snapshot,” was published in the September 2007 issue of the BCMJ.
Mr. Fok started his specialty training in internal medicine at UBC in July 2008. Apart from being an editorial board member for The Appendix, a UBC medical-student newsletter, Mark is interested in photography and playing guitar.
BCMJ content is written primarily by BC physicians, and through the yearly presentation of the J.H. MacDermot Prize the Journal hopes to encourage medical students such as Mr Fok to experience the challenges and rewards of medical publishing, to enrich the content of the Journal, and to seed the next generation of authors.
The prize honors Dr John Henry MacDermot (1883–1969), who was editor of the BCMJ from its roots as the Vancouver Medical Association Bulletin, beginning in 1924. Dr MacDermot oversaw the transition of the publication from the VMA Bulletin to the BC Medical Journal in 1959, and remained as editor until his retirement in 1967.