The Manitoba Medical Service Foundation(MMSF) is pleased to announce that the 2023-2024 R. Samuel McLaughlin / MMSF Research and Education Fellowship Award in Medicine has been awarded to Dr. Alain Beaudry.

The $75,000 award is co-sponsored by the MMSF, the University of Manitoba McLaughlin Foundation and the Dean of Medicine’s Education and Research Fellowship Fund at the University of Manitoba– with each contributing $25,000.

The award aims to support the scholarship of the Rady Faculty of Health Sciences through the training of future clinical faculty members in research and medical education. The term of the award is one (1) year, commencing on July 1, 2023.

Dr. Beaudry, Chair of the Indigenous Admissions Stream at the University of Manitoba, has been awarded for his project, “Tailored Cancer Screening Among Canadian Indigenous Populations.”

Rates of cancers among Indigenous populations in Canada often diverge significantly from the base Canadian rates. Recommendations for cancer screening are usually based on overall population incidence and do not often account for significant variation in subpopulations– the costs and benefits used to develop these recommendations are often based on predominantly non-Indigenous data.

Dr. Beaudry seeks to understand whether a tailored approach to cancer screening for Indigenous populations offers improved early detection and survival to some of Canada’s most vulnerable people.

Dr. Beaudry is an Indigenous physician and has first-hand experience working with both the diseases at hand as well as the affected Indigenous communities in Manitoba and Nunavut. His in-depth understanding of applied economics supports this project’s quantitative analysis. Dr. Beaudry has previously published several impactful papers on chronic disease and is well-connected to Indigenous communities in Manitoba and Canada as a whole.

With the support of the McLaughlin Fund, the MMSF, and the Dean’s Fellowship Fund, this important reconciliatory work toward equitable health outcomes will continue. In the context of increasing Indigenous self-determination in health care delivery, it will allow Indigenous communities and Nations to choose an approach to cancer screening which works best for their citizens and which saves more lives and improves health outcomes.