Dr. Doucet is a general practitioner working at the McGill University Health Center where she fulfills her role as clinician and teacher in emergency medicine and as a hospitalist in the fields of tuberculosis, respirology and general medicine. She is currently chief of family medicine at the Montreal Chest Institute. Moreover, she has over ten years of clinical experience in Aboriginal communities of Northern Quebec, delivering primary care and urgent medical/obstetrical care. Previously, she worked at the municipal family planning clinic of Kingston and was chief of family medicine at student health services. Her travels to South America and Asia, and her experience as a medical volunteer in India, have helped foster a growing interest in issues pertaining to: delivering health care to under-serviced areas, empowering patients/health care workers through education, and the impact of cultural backgrounds on the acceptance of Western medicine and its practice.
Dr. Kirsten Johnson, MD, MPH
Dr. Johnson holds the position of Lecturer at the McGill University Faculty of Medicine and works as an attending staff in the Emergency Department at the Royal Victoria Hospital which is one of the McGill University Health Centres in Montreal. She also provides medical care to Canada’s northern Cree and Inuit communities, working at the Centre Hospitalier de Chisasibi and the Ungava Bay Tulattavik Health Center respectively. Dr. Johnson received her MD from the University of Calgary and specialized in Family Medicine and Emergency Medicine at McGill University. She subsequently obtained her MPH from the Harvard School of Public Health and a diploma from the Humanitarian Studies Initiative, a collaborative program between HSPH, Tufts, and MIT.
Dr. Johnson’s extensive international health experience includes infectious disease and tropical medicine training in Peru, instructing backpack medics in refugee camps on the Thai-Burmese border and working at the MaeTao clinic for Burmese refugees, establishing women’s health programs with the Campaign for Female Education (CamFed) in Ghana, setting up health services in rural Nepal with Helping Hands Health Consortium and Cambodia with the University of Toronto-ROSE medical outreach program, performing rapid needs assessments for Samaritan’s Purse in Uganda, and a program audit for the Red Cross in Kenya. She has also worked as a Critical Care Flight Physician for Skyservice Air Ambulance in Montreal, providing transport and repatriation of critically ill patients worldwide. Over the last two years, Dr. Johnson has focused her interests on humanitarian relief, disaster response and human rights. Most recently she participated in an investigation conducted by Physicians for Human Rights into the destruction of Darfurian livelihoods by the government of Sudan. In her role as a human rights investigator with PHR during the summer of 2005, she performed interviews with refugees from Darfur’s three main ethnic groups in camps along the Chad-Sudan border and subsequently co-authored a report on the Destruction of Livelihoods that is being used by the United Nations Special Representative for the Secretary General on Genocide Prevention and the International Criminal Court.
kirsten [dot] johnson [at] mcgill [dot] ca (E-mail Dr. Kirsten Johnson)
Dr. Juan Carlos Chirgwin, MD
Dr. Juan Carlos Chirgwin is a family physician based at CLSC Park Extension, a community health centre where he conducts pediatric and adult clinics serving a new immigrant/refugee population. Waves of immigrants that have successively populated this dynamic area of Montreal come from four different continents. Dr. Chirgwin has a strong interest in (i) the development of cultural competency within health systems and (ii) recognition of social determinants of health (e.g. poverty, war) that have impacted his own patient population and (iii) practising medicine using a community-centredand interdisciplinary approach. He is an active member of Physicians for Global Survival (www.pgs.ca). In the past, he has travelled to Guatemala to conduct mobile clinics with the nongovernmental organization Pueblo Partisans (www.web.net/~pueblo). In March 2007, Dr. Chirgwin obtained support from the Faculty of Medicine of McGill University and organized a four week pilot selective for medical and nursing students with this NGO in Guatemala. He is currently a teacher and a clinical supervisor for medical students and nurse practitioner trainees from McGill University. Dr. Chirgwin is participating in the creation of an elective for medical students which introduces them to topics of global health in various Montreal clinics.
Marie-Renée B-Lajoie
« We’re comfortable with our lives, and if we listened to anyone who raised questions, we’d have to get engaged in changing things. »
This statement from Margaret Wheatley certainly inspired Marie-Renée. Following a summer in Iquitos, Peru, she opted for a career in medicine. Her engagement in community-based initiatives like Médecins du Monde Canada and clinics in social paediatrics convinced her to become a family doctor. Her work in initiating the province-wide peer to peer education project Sexperts also spiked her interest in public health. This eventually led her to complete an internship at the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. As a family medicine resident at the CLSC Côte-des-Neiges now, she is actively involved in global health, both through her work on the board of directors of Médecins du Monde and her participation in the Humanitarian Studies Initiative for Residents.
Louis-Charles Moreau
Louis-Charles is a first year medical student at McGill University, having graduated from Cegep in 2008. After traveling to Guatemala in 2006 to teach in a Mayan school and to learn Spanish, Louis-Charles fostered his interest for International Health by working successively in a rural health clinic in Senegal in 2008 and in a refugee aid office in Egypt from May to August 2009, while also taking Arabic lessons. In addition to these involvements, he served as National Coordinator for Human Rights and Peace within IFMSA-Quebec in 2009 and is currently the recruitment coordinator for the youth section of Doctors of the World Canada. As part of his work with IFMSA, Louis-Charles traveled to Tunis in March 2009 as a Canadian representative for Human Rights at the General Assembly of the international organization. His interests also include student politics and he was elected Co-President of his class last year while completing his preparatory year within the Med-P program.
Dr. Alan Pavilanis, AB, MD, CM, CCFP, FCFP, Dip Epi
Dr. Pavilanis’s experience includes many years in rural family practice, full-time academic pediatrics (adolescent medicine) and finally teaching in both undergraduate and post graduate family medicine. His experience also includes locum tenens in aboriginal communities in northern Canada. Internationally, Dr. Pavilanis has trained in France and Soviet Lithuania. International experiences include development of primary care services and family medicine program development in Lithuania (Vilnius and Kaunas), Russia (Joer), Latvia (Riga) and South Africa (multiple sites), as well as participation in multilateral workshops.
Dr. Mark J. Yaffe, BSc, MDCM, MClSc, CCFP, FCFP
Tenured Associate Professor of Family Medicine at McGill, Dr. Yaffe has served as a Program Director in the Department. At St. Mary’s Hospital he has been the Chief of the Department of Family Medicine as well as the Undergraduate and Postgraduate educational coordinator. He teaches at undergraduate, postgraduate, and CME / faculty development levels, and provides Masters/PhD thesis supervision. His research interests include family medicine education, diagnosis /treatment of anxiety and depression, family care-giving, elder abuse, QA/I in ambulatory care, life span health care, as well as interdisciplinary research. Internationally Dr. Yaffe has been a Visiting Professor at 5 institutions, and recognized by an Honorary Fellowship of the College of Family Physicians of Canada and inducted into the McGill Faculty of Medicine Honor List for Educational Excellence.