After eight years laying the groundwork for the Northern Medical Program and bringing a medical school to UNBC, David Snadden is expanding his horizons.
He's now the doctor in charge of all medical students in the province as UBC's faculty of medicine as the executive associate dean, education. Despite his high-profile position with UBC, which he took over on Nov. 1, Snadden has no plans to leave Prince George, his home since he left his native Scotland in 2003.
"The faculty of medicine is provincial faculty, with students and faculty all over the province, and it's an important statement for [UBC] to make that they need to place leadership outside Vancouver," said Snadden, the vice-provost of medicine at UNBC. "This is the first time they've done it at this kind of level and to me it's a major statement that they're not about Vancouver.
"I enjoy living in Prince George, my family is here and we have found it such a welcoming community. We enjoy working and living amongst people in northern B.C. and it suits me and my wife and what we like to do outside of work."
Snadden's duties will take him all over the province and he will have an office at UBC, but he says video conferencing will allow him to spend most of his working days at UNBC. He will will draw parallels from on his own experiences overseeing NMP students in his new job working with his UBC colleagues planning strategies for all of B.C. medical students.
"I think what they stand to gain is having someone in a senior position who has worked on one of the distributive sites with our partners outside of Vancouver and understands the provincial picture outside of the city," Snadden said.
"The geography of the north creates challenges of its own and the physicians that work here have a very broad scope of practice. The family docs in some of the small towns are giving anesthetics, they may be doing some operations or C-sections and they tend not to do that in bigger cities. It's a long way sometimes to get to help, so often medicine is practiced in an isolated way because of that, and that brings challenges, but also makes it really exciting."
Considering the support from the medical community needed to teach residents in what is considered an under-served, under-doctored area, Snadden says the NMP is as big as the Prince George hospital (UHNBC) can handle, with 32 new students added each year.
Aside from producing doctors, there are hidden spin-off effects of the program. While there are still shortages, physician numbers are better that they were 10 years ago and Snadden said that is a direct result of the NMP coming to the city.
"If the NMP wasn't successful, I'm not entirely convinced we would have got the cancer clinic (expected to open late in 2012)," he said. "I think these capacity-building things are all linked together. One of the worries of the cancer clinic was would we be able to bring to Prince George the number of radiation and oncology specialists that we needed. Having a medical school in town makes it much more likely to attract the right people and make it successful."
Snadden is in the process of making changes to the curriculum in the UBC medical program. Among the revisions, he wants students to be encouraged to take on leadership roles in dealing with local issues they might encounter in their work. The advantage of the NMP and similar programs in Kelowna and Victoria is their smaller size, which makes it easier to experiment with curriculum changes and trace the effects of changes before they are adopted province-wide. The NMP has found new ways of assessing students in Terrace and Fort St. John which were found to be successful and those tests are about to be introduced to the province's mainstream programs.
Close to half of the 32 NMP students are from northern B.C. and rural areas of the province and many of them come from undergraduate programs at UNBC. Snadden is convinced a lot of those students would not be studying medicine if the program was based in Vancouver. The first graduates came out of residency programs in the summer of 2010. Of that group of 12 who have finished their training, he said 11 are now working in either northern or rural settings.
"That goes way beyond our expectations," said Snadden. "I don't know what it's going to look like in the longterm. Some classes have a few more specialty med students in it so they will take even longer to come through the system, but the potential of attracting some of them back is very high."
