Junior Doctor of the Year 2010

Junior Doctor of the Year

Category proudly sponsored by:

Rewarding the doctor in training who has done most to improve the world we live in or to inspire others.

Tackling controversial issues such as the health needs of people with drug addiction problems and supervised safe injecting facilities has brought much attention on the junior doctor Evan Wood, from Vancouver.

Dr Wood has an impressive research record and by the age of 30 had published no fewer than 200 peer reviewed manuscripts, including first author articles in JAMA, the Lancet, and the New England Journal of Medicine while he was still a medical student.

Now an internal medicine resident at the University of British Columbia and research scientist at the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, DrWood has worked with patients with drug addiction and has made a major difference to rates of HIV infection and overdosing among them. Dr Wood became highly involved in health advocacy in Canada’s poorest neighbourhood and initiated a research programme examining the HIV crisis among injecting drug users in Vancouver’s downtown Eastside.

While still at medical school he held research grants as principal investigator from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the US National Institutes of Health, leading to a large research programme. Among these studies was an evaluation of North America’s first medically supervised safer injecting facility, where drug users can inject pre-obtained  illicit drugs under the supervision of medical staff. The programme reduced overdosing and HIV rates while increasing enrolment in addiction treatment.

Dr Wood says: “I am more interested in addressing the harms of drugs in our society than I am interested in personal recognitions. With this honour, I hope I can use it to help draw greater attention to the problems of drugs—and the need for scientific approaches to address them.

“A very large number of people have helped in this contribution, such as Dr Thomas Kerr and Dr Julio Montaner.”