Dear colleagues,
With 2024 drawing to a close, I wish to take this opportunity to express my heartfelt gratitude to each of you for your many valuable contributions, and celebrate our remarkable achievements this year as a department.
The targets outlined in our 2020-2025 Strategic Plan guided us through half a decade of growth and served as reliable benchmarks to measure our successes. I am delighted to note that as we approach the end of this plan and begin preparing a refreshed 2025-2030 Strategic Plan, we can confidently say we have achieved most of the concrete goals that were set before us. This is a testament to our collective dedication, focus and hard work.
As we look forward, we remain committed to expanding our research capacity at UBC Vancouver and across our distributed sites, and have recruitments in progress in the areas of Concurrent Disorders, Data Science, as well as in the Northern Medical Program, Fraser Program and Vancouver Island. Building on our 2023 momentum, we launched a second successful round of our Stimulus Grant program and the seventh year of our IMH Marshall Fellows Program. On the educational front, we welcomed more Psychiatry postgraduate students for 2024/2025 into our programs than ever before, a trend we look forward to continuing into the future.
Additionally, the 2023 departmental internal review, conducted by a panel of FoM reviewers, presented a valuable opportunity for us to track our many milestones over the last several years, reflect upon the state of the Department, and take a closer look at the opportunities and challenges of our academic environment. In response, we have taken meaningful steps to address the recommendations, including the coalescing of the Resident and Faculty EDI Committees into a unified Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Anti-Racism (EDIA) Committee, establishing an Indigenous Strategies Committee, gathering feedback on the new website to continue improving the visitor experience, and conducting a Faculty, Staff and Graduate Students Mistreatment Reporting Survey, with a Resident Wellness Survey expected in the new year. Additionally, as we continue building clinical faculty support and engagement, we announced the redesignation of the VCH-PHC Regional Rounds as the UBC Psychiatry Grand Rounds beginning in January 2025, extending access to faculty across the province, and our Awards and Recognition Committee have established terms of reference and begun developing processes to identify and proactively promote faculty for nomination.
As you review this year’s highlights in our newsletter, I hope you share a sense of pride in our collective accomplishments. As I embark on my second term as Department Head, I remain indebted to our four Associate Heads and Executive team, who have been indispensable to our leadership team and, of course, to all of our outstanding Department members without whom our achievements thus far would not have been possible. With your continued engagement and ongoing support, I look forward to our continued collaboration in the years ahead.
Once again, I wish to thank you all and wish you a safe, happy and well-deserved rest this holiday season!
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Sincerely,
Dr. Lakshmi N. Yatham, MBBS, FRCPC, MRCPsych (UK), MBA (Exec)
Professor and Head, UBC Department of Psychiatry
Director, Institute of Mental Health, UBC
Regional Head and Program Medical Director, VCH/PHC
The UBC Department of Psychiatry Administration Office respectfully acknowledges the land on which we live, work and play is the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Coast Salish Peoples, the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-waututh).