UNBC celebrates success of medical program

There are six Aboriginal students enrolled in the Northern Medical Program (NMP) offered at the University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC), and while those numbers are far from staggering, they do put the program ahead of many other medical programs in the country when it comes to Aboriginal representation within the student population.

Those six Aboriginal students represent eight per cent of the total enrollment in the NMP. According to a press release issued by UNBC, the estimated percentage of Aboriginal students among the total student population of medical schools across the country is less than five per cent.

The NMP is currently in its third year of operations, having welcomed its first cohort of students in 2004. The program, which is part of the University of British Columbia (UBC) expanded faculty of medicine, was created to try to address a shortage of doctors practicing in northern British Columbia.

“Our purpose here was to try and find a way of training students in a northern context, and trying to find the right kind of students in the hope that some of them, eventually, once they go through all the undergraduate and post-graduate training programs, would come back to the north and help with the difficulties that we have with physician numbers in northern B.C.,” said David Snadden, vice provost of medicine at UNBC and associate dean for the NMP.

The UBC has a distributed faculty of medicine, which means students entering the school’s medical program have a choice of where they want to complete their studies—at UBC in Vancouver, at the University of Victoria, or at the UNBC campus in Prince George, where the NMP is based. While Aboriginal students in the medicine program are free to chose any of the three locations, the UNBC program has a number of features that may make it more appealing, Snadden said.

“I think for Aboriginal students that are from the north, it’s actually easier for them to come and train here because they’re closer to family,” he said.

The Prince George campus also offers an environment that may be more familiar to students who have grown up on reserve than that offered by the campuses in Vancouver or Victoria, he added.

“It’s a small town. We’re in the wilderness ... It’s a very different experience from training in a big city like Vancouver. So I think for those people from small communities, it’s a much more comfortable fit.

“We’re also a small program. At the moment we have 24 students a year coming through. So everybody gets to know each other. The relationships are very close with the physicians in the town and with the community, and we’ve got strong links with the Aboriginal community locally. So I think these are things that attract some Aboriginal students to pick a smaller site.”

Peter Eppinga, a Haida student from Masset on the Queen Charlotte Islands, is one of those who chose to complete his studies in Prince George.

There are many reasons Eppinga decided to study medicine, he explained.

“I want to help people and I love the care in medicine. I love the human body and especially how it functions. Learning how to heal a person with medicine is a great honour,” he said.

“I also wish to implement health changes in the health care system for Aboriginal people. There are a lot of changes that have to take place and I want to be on the front line for those changes.”

Part of the reason Eppinga enrolled in the NMP is because he feels the program will provide him with the knowledge and experience he’ll need down the road.
“If I really want to come back to my reserve and work, I need to really understand what’s going on with the Aboriginal health issues in northern B.C.,” he said.

The fact that the campus is in a small community is an advantage.

“There’s a lot of one on one with patients,” he said. “You’re just more involved.”

The high population of Aboriginal people in the region also means medical students in the NMP also have more opportunities to treat Aboriginal patients, he said.

“So if you want to talk to Aboriginal people and be amongst them, you would get more of an experience of that in the north.”