Peter Gill
Fourth-year medical student Peter Gill is no stranger to undergraduate medical research awards.
He now has one more to add his list after being named a 2014 CIHR Rising Star on April 28. The CIHR Rising Star award recognizes graduate students and postdoctoral fellows at an early stage in their careers for excellence in health research and knowledge translation initiatives. Up to three Rising Stars are named annually.
"I was certainly surprised, and was very humbled and honoured," says Gill. "I'm glad they see the merit of the research and where it's relevant in Canada."
Gill's winning article was published online in Archives of Disease in Childhood in February 2013 and focuses on the increase in emergency room admissions in the United Kingdom for children under the age of 15. The research, which is one of several projects Gill completed for his PhD thesis, was conducted at the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar.
The research illustrates that emergency room admissions for children under 15 years of age increased by 28 per cent over a 12 year period, and admissions that last for less than one day for acute conditions, like pneumonia and urinary tract infections, doubled during the timeframe. Children under the age of five comprise 68 per cent of the total admissions.
Gill says that his findings show that there is an increase in youth being seen in hospital for illnesses that can effectively be treated outside the clinical setting. "One would argue that [these increased admissions] is not the ideal use of resources. If you can treat acute ailments in a community setting, that's better for the patient.
"It's ideal to avoid admitting children to the hospital whenever possible if they can be adequately managed in primary care."
In September 2013, Gill completed his PhD in primary health care at the University of Oxford as a student in the U of A's MD/PhD program, which allows students to take leave from medical school between the second and third years to obtain a PhD. Gill, however, was on a modified program: not only did he take leave between the third and fourth years, he also completed his PhD at another university so he could take advantage of his Rhodes scholarship.
"It's something I think is invaluable and will make me a better clinician and a better researcher," Gill says of the MD/PhD program, noting that the program structure has allowed him to thoroughly understand the academic and research side of medicine in addition to the patient care side.
Although the research was conducted in Britain, it's something that Gill is "very interested in bringing back to Canada." He faces some challenges, however, as Canada does not have national health databases like that in the UK. The UK model allowed Gill to access statistical information for more than 700,000 children for each calendar year, but Canada's health databases are controlled at the provincial level, which may affect the uniformity of collected information.
With graduation only a few weeks away, Gill is looking forward to his pediatric residency at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. He intends to spend the next four years focusing on clinical training to become a "qualified and excellent pediatrician" before stepping into a career as a clinician scientist. He hopes to conduct meaningful research that will improve pediatric health-care delivery.
But residency doesn't mean he's leaving the University of Alberta in the rear-view:
"I do plan on returning to Alberta after I finish residency," he says. "I want to go to Toronto to get exposure to a different training environment and work with world-leading academic general pediatricians so I can bring back the knowledge and skills to Alberta."