U of A team working to improve health care access in Alberta and beyond

University of Alberta master of science student Pulkit Kumar discusses the wide-ranging ways he and his colleagues are working to revamp health care access in the province and across the world.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Michael Higgins: As the Alberta government overhauls the provincial health-care system, a University of Alberta medical student is on a mission of his own to bring about change within the health community, and not only here in our province, but globally also.

You have a very lengthy list of pursuits but let's start quickly on some of what you're doing right here in our province. What are you aiming to achieve where rural surgical care is involved?

Pulkit Kumar: This project is launched by the Office of Global Surgery here at the University of Alberta under the guidance of Dr. Abdullah Saleh, who's the director of the office, and The idea is basically to have enhanced surgical skills (ESS) and obstetrical surgical skills (OSS). So we're going to train family doctors with ESS and OSS and send them to rural Alberta, which will in the long run help the residents of rural Alberta to get basic surgery done where they are living, instead of driving two to three hours just to get to Edmonton or Calgary to get some very minor surgical procedures done. We are also hoping to get the surgical wait times reduced by quite a bit if we get this project up and running soon.

MH: And I understand too, AHS is kicking in some dollars toward this?

PK: Not only AHS but the province as well. So we have about $10 million for this project, a yearly grant of $10 million that is going to be put into this project, and we're hoping to have this project as a long-term solution, not just as something short term. We at the Office of Global Surgery always focus on long-term sustainable goals, so that's what we are hoping to achieve with this project.

MH: Now there has been considerable focus and concern of late over the sustainability of cancer care services in Alberta. To what degree does your research reach into that realm?

PK: So I can talk about the U of A Cancer Society, which I founded in 2020. The idea of that student organization was to push forward more research amongst undergraduate students and the other aspect was to educate people more so about cancer. I've been talking about this to numerous journalists, that When I went to rural Alberta I saw some very, very shocking treatment of cancer patients with their family members. So one of the stories that still is in my mind was that when I visited a family who had a cancer patient, they sort of cornered the patient to the room and said, ‘We think cancer is airborne,’ which was really, really surprising for me. We were like, ‘We don't know where you got to know that information from but we just want to tell you cancer is not airborne and we would like you to read more scientific papers, more scientific discussions that are happening around cancer, and we will help you read those papers by removing all the scientific jargon.’ And so in the long run, my idea is to build critical reading in these communities so that people are well informed as to what is going on in terms of medical research. When it comes to sustainability in cancer research, I'm obviously part of academia, I focus on research in academia, meaning that academia is a little slow when it comes to the industry, but we are treating any disease holistically. We are not just focusing on one aspect of the disease, we are treating everything holistically, which takes a bit of time, and I'm certainly OK with that because if it is taking time, that just means we are making sure that we are covering all the bases of the disease that we are focusing on.

MH: We're talking about Alberta Health elements, but you also do stuff globally. What role do you ultimately see for yourself in the health care dynamic?

PK: My job is to just positively contribute to the environment, to the system. Many people when they start, they are very enthusiastic and they often say, ‘We want to change the system, we are here to change everything.’ I'm like, there's a reason the system is in place. But my job is to look at the gaps, look at the voids that are in the system, and then sort of address the concerns, address those voids, fill out the gaps. So globally, even with my work with South Asia, what I'm doing is looking at those gaps in the medical system of those respective countries, and then I'm looking at how we can improve the system and how we can fill those gaps. For instance, in Nepal, there's like five to six communities that are living in rural parts of Nepal where they have no health care, no local clinics. So we sort of collaborated with local (non-governmental organizations) there and we built a mobile health care unit, a mobile surgical unit, and sent them to those communities so that we can help them, at least in the short term. And in the long term we're going to plan and build at least two clinics per community so that they don't have to travel 100, 150 kilometers just to get some basic surgery done.