You are invited to join us for our CAME WEBINAR SERIES

The CAME webinar series is designed to bring practical, evidence and experience-based advice to Canadian health educators.

Through these monthly Zoom-based CAME webinars, you can listen to presentations on key topics in health professional education and engage with an expert and colleagues in live discussions.

Registration is now free for CAME members! Recordings of webinars are also available to our members via our new membership portal!

Title: The Impact of a Single Drop of Water: A Program of Scholarship Examining Medical Student Career Selection

Date: Tuesday, January 20, 2026 – This webinar will be delivered in English

Presentation 1: 12:00pm-1:00pm Eastern, (9:00am-10:00am Pacific)

Presenter: Dr. Paris Ingledew, University of British Columbia

Biography:

Dr. Paris-Ann Ingledew is a Clinical Professor in the UBC Department of Surgery and the Executive Vice President and Chief Medical Officer of BC Cancer.  She is the UBC Undergraduate Division Director for Radiation Oncology & Developmental Radiotherapeutics.  Clinically, she works as a Radiation Oncologist at the Vancouver Cancer Centre.  To all her roles she brings a deep passion for excellence in patient care, clinical teaching and medical education research.

She completed her MD and residency at UBC. She was a UBC Center for Health Education Scholarship (CHES) Fellow and she completed her MHPE at the University of Illinois Chicago. She has contributed to setting national standards for training medical students in oncology and is the lead for a non-profit website used nationally and internationally in medical schools www.learnoncology.ca. With respect to resident education, she is the Chair of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons Radiation Oncology Specialty Committee. Her current research interests are focused on the physician competencies related to patient education and projects related to oncology education in the undergraduate medical setting.

Webinar Overview:

The formal medical school curriculum is typically saturated, resulting in a finite exposure to many critical knowledge areas.  For some areas of medicine, this relative underexposure may impact awareness of and interest in specialty careers.  Radiation oncology is a small to moderate sized residency program in Canada.  For several years, residency applications had declined, with many programs going unmatched.  With an ever-increasing prevalence and incidence of cancer, and approximately 40% of Canadians developing cancer in their lifetime, it is essential to have a stable supply of oncology specialists.  A scholarly approach was taken to understand both the enablers and barriers to selection of radiation oncology as a career path.  Our research findings mapped to existing conceptual frameworks showing the impact of many systems and factors on medical student career choice.  In radiation oncology, a personal connection to the specialty, early curricular and clinical exposure and longitudinal mentorship were highly impactful.

Over almost a decade, purposeful interventions have been developed and implemented to address these findings.  These include a funded summer observerships and research experiences, a national scientific meeting research award complimented with resident mentorship, career information podcasts, and a national extra-curricular oncology course complimented with staff mentorship. Iterative evaluation of these programs has shown a positive impact on medical student awareness of oncology and improved interest in oncology related residency programs.  Radiation oncology applications have stabilized with all programs having sufficient interest to meet demand.

This webinar will explore research in medical student career selection and demonstrate the use of a scholarly approach to thoughtfully expand existing knowledge, develop and implement informed interventions with ongoing iterative evaluation.

Learning Objectives:

By the end of this session, participants should be able to:

1. Describe existing and expanded conceptual frameworks to describe enabling factors and barriers that impact medical student career selection.
2. Recognize the impacts of personal connection and mentorship on recruitment and retention to career paths.
3. Identify opportunities in the participants’ own context where a scholarly approach may be used to expand on existing knowledge and allow for informed strategies to address emerging medical education issues.