In times of crisis, necessity is often the mother of invention. These UBC medical students responded to the emerging challenges of COVID-19 by moving quickly, collaborating, and creating innovative solutions. We share their stories in the hope of educating and inspiring our fellow Canadians.
COVID-19 Rapid Literature Update Task Force
(March to June 2020)
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| Amanda Dancsok, eighth-year MD/PhD student, team leader |
Amanda joined the COVID-19 Rapid Literature Update Task Force to support the Vancouver Coastal Health Infection Prevention and Control team. The task force provided rapid and reliable reviews of COVID-19 literature to support clinicians on the front lines and help develop health authority policies.
COSMIC Gravity Ventilator (gVent) [2]
(March to May 2020)
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| Chase Crisfield, MD, resident, inventor of gVent | Nicki Gabers, MD, resident, gVent team co-leader |
Chase and Nicki joined the Collective Open Source Medical Innovations for COVID19 (COSMIC) organization [3] to contribute to the response to the COVID-19 crisis. While at COSMIC, they invented and developed the gVent, a novel ventilator for providing breathing support to COVID-19 patients. As shown in this video [4], the gVent is a pressure-controlled positive pressure ventilator. The components of the gVent cost $400 and the gVent can be assembled and operated in low-resource settings. The gVENT received a Roche Canada grant for $100 000.
SARS-CoV-2 Laboratory Surveillance System [5]
(March to June 2020)
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| Christine Lukac, MPH, fourth-year medical student, epidemiologist with BCCDC |
Christine worked with Dr Hind Sbihi to develop the COVID-19 BC province surveillance system. The system reports daily provincial COVID-19 cases, testing volumes, and percent-positive tests. The information generated by the surveillance system is shared daily with Dr Bonnie Henry, other medical health officials, and the public via the COVID-19 Dashboard [5] on the BCCDC homepage. Christine’s work has supported the development of policies for promoting COVID-19 testing for specific populations, increasing testing volumes, and reducing test result turnaround time.
COV-Ed [6]
(March to September 2020)
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| Gabriel Blank, fourth-year medical student, co-founder | Rod Vafaei, MBT, fourth-year medical student, co-founder |
Gabriel and Rod teamed up and used their love for art, medical knowledge, and leadership skills to create the COV-Ed team. The COV-Ed team produced educational cartoon videos about COVID-19 for children. The COV-Ed videos, which have been viewed over 100 000 times on YouTube, cover topics such as proper hand washing [7], the importance of social distancing [8] and PPE [9].
COSMIC Clinical Respiratory Support System [10]
(March to July 2020)
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| Ryan Yan, fourth-year medical student, co-lead |
Ryan was the co-lead of the Clinical Respiratory Support team at COSMIC [3]. As shown in this video [10], his team designed and built a low-cost and scalable positive pressure ventilation system to treat COVID-19 patients in respiratory distress. This Vancouver Sun article [11] describes their “field hospital” demonstration at the BC Arts Club. Their design is published on the GitHub design sharing platform.
BC COVID-19 Medical Student Response Team (MSRT) [12]
(March 2020 to present)
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| Vivian Tsang, fourth-year medical student, co-founder |
Vivian co-founded the MSRT to support frontline workers. The MSRT mobilized over 700 medical students from UBC to fill roles at the 811 HealthLink BC phoneline, provide child care for front-line workers, and provide prescription delivery for high-risk patients who couldn’t travel to their pharmacies. The MSRT’s work was covered in detail in this Vancouver Sun article [13].
UBC medical students have contributed with innovative and impactful responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. To learn more about these medical students and their response to COVID-19, check out their video interviews about their projects (here [14]) and their messages to Canadians (here [15]) on YouTube.
—Elsie Wang
Third-year BSc Student, UBC
—Philip Edgcumbe, MD, PhD
Diagnostic Radiology Resident, UBC
Med Edge Consulting, Principal