Maintaining and Enhancing Canada’s Academic Departments of Medicine (ADM) for the Benefit of Canadians: A SWOT Analysis by the Canadian Association of Professors of Medicine (CAPM) reveals existential threats to ADMs
Leading the Department of Medicine is a privilege. There is the pride in seeing the accomplishments of our faculty, excitement in building new Divisions and launching new graduate training programs and a sense of future-building inspired by the training of talented young physicians. Above all I have the sense of being engaged in a dynamic and passionate team dedicated to achieving positive goals: preventing disease and healing people, teaching medical students and residents, and performing research that will improve the future. However, medicine is not an easy profession.
In the final edition of this series focused on providing examples of translational research at the Department of Medicine, I will highlight the activities of Dr. Mark Ormiston and some of my own research. Both of our research programs endeavour to span the gap between the patient and the basic science research laboratory. Although there are many other faculty who run excellent translational research programs, I hope that the examples in this series of three blogs, provides the reader with some sense of translational research in practice.
In the 1st edition of this blog, I introduced TIME, the Translational Institute of Medicine, an initiative being launched in the DOM in 2018. TIME includes a new Graduate program (MSc and PhD), new infrastructure and a new web resource, linking trainees and investigators to one another and to vital resources (human and infrastructure). We heard from Dr. Charles Hindmarch, Dr. Rachel Holden and Dr. Paula James. Their research programs help illustrate what we mean by translational medicine.
In 2018 we are launching the Translational Institute of Medicine (TIME) at Queen’s, beginning in the Department of Medicine. Like all good ideas TIME was born from a conversation over coffee. Stephen Vanner and I were trying to figure out how to grow the research pie, train more researchers and ensure that all faculty had access to research resources, which sometimes are hidden in plain sight. This blog will be your introduction to TIME. Although we have been hard at work on building TIME for almost 2 years, formal approval for several key components is pending, so consider this a preview.
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.
Julius Caesar, Act 1, scene 2, 135–141