When discussing the distributed sites of the University of British Columbia’s Medical Undergraduate Program, people are generally focused on three areas of interest: the number of family doctors produced at the sites, the location in which graduates choose to practise, and the quality of the education graduates receive when learning somewhere other than the traditional medical boot camps of Vancouver. All of these issues are important and certainly deserve to be analyzed and discussed at length. However, as the old saying goes, if one focuses on the destination, the journey is missed.
A UBC study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry reveals the multiple health concerns faced by an esti-mated 3000 tenants in single-room occupancy (SRO) hotels in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The results of the study aim to improve the provision of health care and housing among residents of the Downtown Eastside.
Each year, first- and second-year UBC medical students raise money for rural medicine through social activities and fundraising endeavors. The Class of 2015 raised $9293 through this year’s efforts, and voted to donate the funds to Hope Air, a Canada-wide charity that arranges free flights to transport low-income families to specialized health care services available only in urban centres.
Following funding cuts by the provincial government, the University of British Columbia has announced that it will take over financing of the Therapeutics Initiative, a drug safety and efficacy investigation group primarily staffed by UBC personnel.
The BC government suspended funding to the initiative in October 2012, pending the results of an investigation into the handling of drug data by ministry staff. UBC announced it would fund the initiative in the meantime to make sure that staff don’t lose their appointments while waiting for funding to be reinstated.
Five projects by members of the UBC Faculty of Medicine have been selected to receive $6.2 million in funding from Genome Canada and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. The projects will be conducted over the next three years, working toward the following goals:
