Council Award
ball, football. I had a lot of fun. I kept getting kicked
out of class because I was late from football practice,
stuff like that. I often laugh and wonder if I would have
gotten into university nowadays with the marks that are
required. I did fine. I just didn’t excel. I think I got 52%
in Grade 12 math. It all clicked together when I went to
university and I decided to pursue medicine. Everything
started to go much better at that point in time.
Q: How did you decide to become a doctor?
A: I was more oriented toward the sciences than arts
and literature. Medicine was a practical expression of
science that could combine with the other competencies
that are required of physicians that I thought I could
excel at. I didn’t get into medicine on my first attempt. I
reapplied and got a note that I was 65th on the waiting
list. Two months later, they told me they were giving
me a position but I had started thinking about other
options by then, such as theology. My parents left me
alone in the back yard to think about it for a while. I
decided to accept and entered medical school in 1974.
Q: Why did you choose internal medicine?
A: Halfway through my first post-graduate year, I
thought it [internal medicine] was the most academically challenging most fascinating thing I could do.
My hand-eye coordination wouldn’t serve me well in
surgery and I was much more interested in evidencebased medicine.
Q: What does your role as Director of Continuing
Education at the Royal College entail?
A: It’s a fantastic role. Essentially it’s establishing a
national continuing professional development system
for all specialists who are fellows of the Royal College.
Maintenance of Certification became mandatory in
2001 to maintain your membership in the College so
I had responsibilities of developing, designing, implementing and evaluating that entire initiative and it has
a number of parts to it. So it’s a framework of CPD activities, a set of standards, a formal accreditation system,
and a credit system, a central and regional educational
program. We’ve also tried to contribute to the research
and scholarship in continuing education.
We oversee 68 specialties except for family medicine
which has its own college. So we had to create a frame-
18
Dialogue Issue 2, 2015
work that was relevant to every specialty. I’ve collaborated with international CPD systems throughout the
world so I’ve learned from and contributed to the evolution of continuing education for physicians no matter
where they’re practising on the globe.
Q: What is the role of regulatory Colleges in CPD?
A: With the advent of revalidation initially by the medical regulatory authorities of Canada in 2007, we’ve created a much more accountable and integrated system in
the latter part of the last decade even than we did in the
early 2000s. I see the regulatory authorities as part of
our national CPD system. They are an integral part of
it. Education now has to exist in a context. We can’t be
divorced from each other around the obligations of the
profession in self-regulation and the privileges we have.
Q: What are the two working groups that you
initiated doing?
A: One is to establish a common set of national accreditation standards for CPD provider organizations. The
other group is working to provide a framework that can
allow support for continuing education to be operationalized. The idea is to have a common set of ethical
standards around financial or in-kind support from
for-profit industry sponsors of continuing education
and have it framed appropriately so the profession can
be in control of content development and evaluation. In
that way, continuing education cannot be influenced by
commercial interests.
The Royal College serves as the convener and provides
the secretariat for these working groups but it is really
a collaboration of other organizations rather than my
own work.
Q: Who is in your family?
A: My wife Judy is a homemaker. We’ve