2021 Awards of Excellence Recipients
The annual Awards of Excellence recognize members of the healthcare community for their contributions to creating an optimal training environment for residents in BC. There were a number of exceptional candidates this year, and we thank everyone for their valuable efforts. The recipients of the year’s awards are as follows:
Award of Merit
The Award of Merit recognizes a resident whose achievements and/or leadership reflect the aims and objectives of Resident Doctors of BC. The award is presented annually to a resident who has shown outstanding initiative in resident health and well-being, promotion of the role of residents in the health care system, or advocacy and representation of residents leading to improved work or learning environments.
Recipient: Dr. Danny Mansour
Dr. Danny Mansour is a PGY-4 Dermatology resident. His nominators wrote:
“Nationally, Dr. Mansour has been working to improve education for residents as co-chair of the Canadian Dermatology Association Resident and Fellow society. During the past 2 years, he has made significant strides in improving education. One significant weakness of dermatology residency programs and a source of stress for many residents is the steep learning curve when transition from rotating internship years to core dermatology years. As a means of improving this transition, Dr. Mansour has developed and implemented a Dermatology Boot Camp for junior residents. He has recruited dermatologists from across Canada to give lectures on high yield topics for junior residents. This past two years, 34 dermatologists have provided lectures for residents across Canada. He is also the resident representative on the Royal College Competency by Design Specialty committee. He used this platform to advocate for curriculum changes that have been of special interest to dermatology residents for many years. Through these initiatives and activities, Danny has changed dermatology education across Canada.
Locally, Dr Mansour has worked tirelessly to improve the educational experience of current and future UBC dermatology residents. As chief resident, Danny has been instrumental in promoting curriculum changes to improve resident education. He spent a significant amount of time meeting with other residents to determine possible areas of improvement. He has identified that a different structure to academic lectures may be more beneficial to learning based on resident feedback and he has been working with the Residency Education Committee to help facilitate possible changes. Additionally, the educational experience is more than just transmission of information, and this fact is not lost on Dr. Mansour. During his conversations with junior residents, he noticed that there was a feeling of being disconnected from dermatology during the rotating internship years and a lot of anxiety about starting core dermatology training. Consequently, Danny has been working with the program directors to find ways to better integrate the junior residents such as finding ways to have dermatology rotations earlier in training as well as assigning each junior resident a senior resident mentor. Dr. Mansour’s enthusiasm and initiatives have made a noticeable improvement in resident engagement. While dedication and hard work have been important to the changes that Dr. Mansour has help facilitate, his tact and emotional intelligence while advocating for change has been essential.”
“Danny displays great communication skills and works well within a team. Professionally, Danny is enthusiastic, hardworking, engaged, diligent, kind, organized, generous with his time, and worked well independently. He was frequently complimented by the medical students for his advocacy and teaching ability.
Danny is outstanding as an advocate for his fellow residents. He taught his fellow residents for over an hour in dermatology at their academic half day. His talk was so clear and well received he agreed to come back every year and present his talk. He has presented for our residents for 5 years now and does this voluntarily.
In addition, he has continued his advocacy within his own dermatology program. He is currently chief resident and heavily involved in his program’s curriculum development. He actively sought out to meet with the heads of the three PGY 1 program sites to make changes for his fellow incoming residents for their PGY 1 year. He succeeded to make a significant overhaul of rotations for their Dermatology program. This will make a very big difference to both wellness and the educational component of the incoming residents.”
Dr. Patricia Clugston Memorial Award for Excellence in Teaching Award
The Dr. Patricia Clugston Memorial Award for Excellence in Teaching recognizes a physician clinical educator for his or her contributions to residents’ medical education. The recipient will have created a safe learning environment that encourages self-inquiry, supports adult learning, and fosters within learners a desire to achieve their highest potential.
Recipient: Dr. Lindsay Bishop
Dr. Lindsay Bishop is a clinical instructor currently practicing at Surrey Memorial Hospital and Surrey Older Adult Community Mental Health Team. Her nominators wrote:
“For many psychiatry residents, their rotations with Dr. Bishop stand out as one of the best learning experiences in their medical careers. She is widely known by a variety of superlatives and as a supportive and caring preceptor who is highly dedicated to resident education and wellness.
Dr. Bishop teaches residents and medical students in a geriatric psychiatry setting. Although the learners are usually new to this subspecialty, we quickly learn to thrive because of Dr. Bishop’s thoughtful guidance. She sets the tone for the rotation with a formal review of learning objectives that is learner-centred and individualizes the rotation and learning opportunities offered based on learner interest. She also triages patients to ensure that she is accepting care for patients that are suited to our learning needs.
She encourages active participation in patient care from day one, while providing an abundance of support. This includes lengthy discussion of cases, multiple times a day, and dedicated time weekly to formally discuss and review clinical guidelines. In these discussions, she is skillful at gently probing for more ideas, continually challenging residents to think critically about their approach to diagnosis and treatment of complex patients. She draws on patient cases to enrich clinical understanding, even in instances where residents may not have had the opportunity to directly participate in care due to time constraints.
Although Dr. Bishop often has learners at different levels (MSI3, PGY 3-5) rotating with her, she sets aside time to review specific learning objectives and guidelines individually with each learner to ensure that we are all meeting our goals in a way that is appropriate to our training level. Within this setting, she creates opportunities for residents to teach other residents and medical students, allowing us to develop experience in medical education.
Dr. Bishop is also very involved in the provision of didactic teaching. She develops and teaches content to residents and medical students on their respective academic days. This involves lecture-style teaching, case formulation practice, observed interviews and OSCE-style sessions. She highlights information that is high yield for exam purposes. Among PGY-5’s, her rotation is known for being an excellent exam preparation opportunity with dedicated teaching time and OSCE practice. Within the program, a worksheet that she has created on case formulation has been widely circulated and is heavily used as a resource for the Royal College exam.
Dr. Bishop is adept at providing individualized feedback that comments both on the specific patient interaction but also on her thoughtful observations of more longstanding strengths and areas for development. In doing so, she offers valuable and actionable advice related to career and skill development, for example discussing career opportunities that would be suited to a resident’s specific skillset or suggesting electives and learning opportunities that address identified areas for improvement.
Dr. Bishop is a pioneer of resident wellness. She does an exceptional job of role modelling this and actively encouraging residents to seek opportunities to do so as well, in a way that is personalized and sustainable for our own careers. In the COVID era of physician burnout, this has been an invaluable learning experience that is rarely offered by others. In this ability to teach not only exam material but also the practicalities of sustaining a practice in medicine, Dr. Bishop truly shines.
Dr. Bishop is an exemplary resident teacher and mentor. She is highly deserving of recognition and of the Dr. Patricia Clugston award.”
Residents’ Advocate Award
The Residents’ Advocate Award recognizes an individual who displays a significant interest in issues of importance to Residents. The award is presented annually to a person who advocates for the personal, professional or educational advancement of residents.
Recipient: Dr. Rahel Zewude
Dr. Rahel Zewude is a PGY-3 Internal Medicine resident. Her nominators wrote:
“Dr. Zewude simply delivers excellence in all that she does, in both her clinical work as an internal medicine resident physician and numerous endeavours in the realm of advocacy for Black residents and issues of importance to our community.
In such a short period of time, Rahel has made significant contributions in catalyzing structural changes in equity, diversity and inclusion at UBC Medicine and beyond. Notably, she is the founder and current president of the Black Physicians of BC, a grassroots not-for-profit society. Within this role, she has led a team that has already made considerable strides in advocating for the combatting of institutionalized racism within our system and has established a community of support for Black physicians and medical trainees in our province.
She has also catalyzed structural change and action at UBC through her advocacy, including the review of the undergraduate medical education (UGME) curriculum at UBC Medicine, and hires that focus on Equity, Diversity and Inclusion work. She has also communicated with the UBC anti-racism taskforce, with direct impacts in her work being incorporated by the UBC anti-racism taskforce in developing the institutional wide anti-racism policy across UBC. She also advocated at a provincial and national government level to improve the inclusivity of the BC healthcare workforce, to identify the unique health needs of the Black community and build targeted public health interventions including disaggregated race-based data collection.
As part of the pandemic response, Rahel advocacy organized a virtual community event for the Black community in BC in partnership with community organizations such as Hogan’s Alley Society and Unique Get Together Society. She served as a speaker alongside other Black physicians including public health experts and discussed COVID-19 morbidity and mortality, vaccine development. She performed literature review of reported vaccine side effects and communicated these in public friendly language in addition to discussing the historical legacies of medical racism with the goal to improve vaccine confidence and uptake in BC’s Black community.
Furthermore, she has made exemplary efforts in founding the UBC Community of Support which was able to provide mentorship to prospective undergraduate and medical students from traditionally underrepresented groups.”
Congratulations to Dr. Danny Mansour, Dr. Lindsay Bishop, and Dr. Rahel Zewude. They will receive commemoration on a plaque at the Resident Doctors of BC office, a personal commemorative award, and a $1000 donation each to the charity/charities of their choice.