The Northern Medical Program is celebrating a decade of producing physicians and Dr. Paul Winwood is starting to see the fruits of that success.
"It feels fabulous," said Winwood, who is the associate vice president of medicine for the University of Northern British Columbia.
"I walk around the hospital and I see people that I was teaching seven years ago and now they're my colleagues and they're experts,"
A typical graduate will have competed a three-year undergraduate degree in biochemistry at UNBC and then the four-year NMP program.
After that, they'll begin residencies lasting from two years for a family practitioner to as much as seven years for some specialties.
Fifty-eight per cent of the graduates go into family medicine.
"And I think that's about right because the needs for northern and rural B.C. are primarily in family medicine," Winwood said.
"Now that said, we have had grads go into every specialty there is, including plastic surgery, cardiac surgery, public health, so we are very confident now that our grads are ready to take on any type of career in medicine, any specialty and they do well."
Moreover, Winwood said many who've gone on to become specialists have come back and are practicing in Prince George.
"We have a surgeon back, we have an oncologist back, we have an anathesiologist back, we have an emergency physician back," he said.
In all 25 students graduated from the NMP on Friday, 10 of them from northern B.C.
