Cultural Competence

Sometimes it can feel like an uphill battle to carve out a niche. Make sure your niche complements your pharmacy’s strengths and is sustainable. Your pharmacy is your passion. It’s important that what your practice does and stands for forms a key part of the community and is a reflection of you.

At this week's Ottawa Board of Health meeting, Dr. Vera Etches said the goal of the new approach she's suggesting would be the same, namely minimizing hospitalizations and deaths, as well as societal disruption.

Canada's National Advisory Committee on Immunization has established its recommendations for vaccinating key populations in anticipation of the initial rollout of a COVID-19 vaccine.

I get to thinking there's at least an opportunity, if not an explicit purpose, in our trajectory toward senescence. On bad days, it freaks me out and I enter my default existentialism that seems to have coloured most of my life, from frantically saving the dying insects on the surface of my childhood pool to contemplating the spirited air that must surround the hallways of our local hospice and its quiet lakeside dock.

Who would have thought that it might be good to talk about yourself in the third person? As if you weren’t you, but him? As if you weren’t actually there, and anyway, you didn’t want yourself to find out you were talking about him in case it seemed like, well, gossip? I mean, only royalty, or the personality-disordered, are able to talk like that without somebody phoning the police.

Junior health minister Lionel Carmant called the investment "unprecedented'' and said the announcement was moved ahead in response to the Halloween night attack that killed two people and injured five.

We’ve been getting by with virtual care, and during the pandemic, it may be the best option possible given the many constraints we are facing. But we need to recognize and value the relational effort that makes virtual care function. Ultimately, family medicine is built on relationships. It's relationships, in the clinic and in our communities that will get us through this pandemic.

Proposed legislation to amend Canada’s law on medical assistance in dying goes against the nature of medicine, which is to heal patients and alleviate suffering, says Dr. Ramona Coelho, a family physician in London, Ont. Dr. Coelho is among a group of physicians who wrote an open letter opposing Bill C-7. More than 800 Canadian doctors have now signed the letter.

In the summer of 2017, I was the treating emergency physician involved in the care of two Inuit children from Nunavik who were transferred to the Montreal Children’s Hospital (MCH) by Évacuations aéromédicales du Québec (ÉVAQ), the provincially run medical evacuation airlift service. The first child was a preschooler who fell off a moving all-terrain vehicle earlier that morning and was transferred to us with a suspicion of injuries to the abdomen and head.