"That dedicated clinician who takes care of the poor in an inner city clinic can be a real guidepost."
In my opinion it’s important not just to look for some experience, but to look for a mentor who can show you what they do and why they do it, and if they inspire you, you may decide that’s what you want to do with your life too. That role model, that dedicated clinician who takes care of the poor in an inner city clinic can be a real guidepost to whether or not this is what you want to be doing, and in my experience, it’s made a big difference. I’m thinking of a family physician who works in one of the poorest, most disadvantaged neighbourhoods in Washington D.C. and I worked for him for a month and certainly found that to be an inspiring experience. He’s someone I think of being a role model for anyone who wants to work with the poor.

"It was the first time in my medical career that I really felt that I helped someone."
You’re really privileged in the relationships that you have with your patients, and one of the first experiences I had as a very green student with very little medical knowledge was talking with a patient who had gone through a lot of very, very difficult things in his life. We were able to just talk about it for 30, 40 minutes and I was able to provide him with someone who wouldn’t judge him and would just be able to listen to him and offer a supportive comment, and really, it was the first time in my medical career that I really felt that I helped someone, that I really did something tangible.

"It really is full frontal."
They have to be non-judgmental—kind of tough. They have to be very open. It really is full frontal, and sometimes it’s just too much. Sometimes students just can’t deal with it and actually leave partway though rounds. Sometimes they come and are polite and just feel that this is—and I respect that—they just say, "This is not for me. Thanks very much." Sometimes they become totally addicted and love it and continue right through their years as students, come for rounds on holidays. I have people who come back for rounds. They have done residencies. They’re practicing somewhere, and they’ll phone me up and just say, "I’m driving through Ottawa. How ‘bout I do rounds with you tomorrow?" It’s fun. It’s great to see them. So there is now a group of people who have self-selected themselves out as people interested in this. Some of the students have become residents and now have developed practices in inner-city medicine elsewhere and are working in this environment elsewhere, and I see them often, and it’s wonderful to see how they’re doing.

"Let’s just turn around and look after what we have in our own backyard."
The fact that there are people who are not able to access healthcare is not something that just happens outside of Canada or outside of France or outside of the western medical world. There are populations and communities inside these countries who get little, if any, care, despite the public or private systems that exist, and no one ever hears about them and no one ever talks about these communities. It’s not at the forefront of the political agenda. So really, having Doctors Without Borders, well, if you actually truly define what does Doctors Without Borders mean or Médecins Sans Frontières means, it means that doctors will go where no one else will go. They don’t see borders or barriers as an issue; so technically, Doctors Without Borders should include all the communities inside the Western countries. Doctors Within Borders, well, let’s just turn around and look after what we have in our own backyard.

"We need a lot of young minds with new ideas"
There’s a whole lot of work to be done, and there’s a lot of room for innovation and creativity. In my experience I think that a lot of the innovation comes with young minds who aren’t set in their ways, and we need a lot of young minds with new ideas, new ways of doing things, to come into the area of inner city health or working in the area of research and social inequalities."

"The most important thing as a physician is that you care about people."
My mentor said you’re going to be spending your life serving people, your patients. That’s our life. So this is an honour to become a physician, and you need to pay back the people. As a family physician where you know the family, and as a rural physician where you know the community and work with the community, you have to be part of it, and part of the solution as well. In a rural community, my patients are also my friends. They are precious to me and I do the best I can for them.

The most important thing as a physician is that you care about people, then you’ll likely be a good physician, because all the medical, all the science part of it, you can learn. The value system, that attitude is either there or you don’t have it, and that is part of growing up, I think.