Dr. M. Ian Bowmer Award for Leadership in Social Accountability

Dr. Anthony Nguyen recently completed his medical degree at the University of Toronto and is now a resident in physical medicine and rehabilitation at the University of British Columbia (UBC). His passion for socially accountable health care is rooted in personal history—his parents were refugees from the Vietnam War who resettled in Canada. Witnessing how they tackled the unknown has shaped his resilient mindset and lifelong commitment to addressing health disparities in underserved communities.

As executive co-director of the IMAGINE Clinic, a student-run interdisciplinary health initiative, Dr. Nguyen led efforts to expand free health care services annually to more than 300 marginalized patients without provincial health coverage in downtown Toronto. While caring for a patient with severe leg wounds, he recognized that treatment alone was insufficient; preventative education and upstream advocacy were crucial. In response, he oversaw the implementation of over 50 wound care workshops across community shelters. Through IMAGINE, Dr. Nguyen has learned to prioritize sustainable health care interventions rooted in proactive education, collaboration, and advocacy.

Dr. Nguyen’s commitment to social accountability extends beyond IMAGINE. As a lead and mentor in the Near Peer Equity Mentorship Program, he helped redesign a program that supports medical students with chronic illnesses and disabilities, ensuring they receive accommodations and guidance to pursue their careers in medicine. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he partnered with VaxFacts+ and the Jane Finch Family Health Team to engage patients directly in conversations about vaccine concerns, successfully encouraging many to get immunized.

Now entering the field of physical medicine and rehabilitation, Dr. Nguyen is especially interested in increasing access to rehabilitation services for underserved and remote communities. He is excited to take part in UBC’s week-long outreach clinics in Whitehorse, Yukon, and hopes to explore ways of building on these outreach programs to deliver sustainable community-centred care. He remains committed to advancing social accountability in medicine through a lens of equitable, interdisciplinary, and function-focused rehabilitation.

Dr. Valéry-Drice Tchomba is a psychiatry resident at the Université de Montréal. He completed his medical doctorate at the Université de Sherbrooke after studying pharmacy at the Université Laval. Recognized for his leadership in addressing racism in health care, he draws on his personal and academic experiences to promote a more equitable, inclusive, and human-centred approach to medicine.

During his residency, Dr. Tchomba led a project focused on implementing the Self-assessment for Modification of Anti-Racism Tool (SMART) at the psychiatry outpatient clinic of l’Hôpital Notre-Dame. This initiative raised awareness and trained and mobilized clinical teams in different approaches to delivering more culturally sensitive care. This project, centred on recognizing and addressing implicit racial bias in health care, led him to present more than 15 conferences in both clinical and academic settings across Quebec. He currently sits on the Continuing Professional Development Committee of the Association of Psychiatric Physicians of Quebec.

Beyond psychiatry, Dr. Tchomba is actively involved in several professional and community-based initiatives. As a member of his department’s Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Committee, he has contributed to advancing practices that support more culturally sensitive care. He is also engaged with the Black Medical Students’ Association of Canada, the Association of Cameroonian Physicians of Canada, and the Alter-Natives Professional Centre. Through these commitments, he strives to build a more representative and equitable health care system for all.