Philip Owen Professorship in Addiction Medicine Research
Dr. Nadia Fairbairn is a graduate of the BCCSU’s Addiction Medicine Research Fellowship and now director of this program that trains the next generation of clinician scientists in addiction medicine. A general internist who specializes in addiction medicine at St. Paul’s Hospital, Dr. Fairbairn’s role as an assistant professor of medicine at UBC and scientist at the BCCSU allows her to develop, monitor, and evaluate innovative approaches for opioid use disorder and train health professionals how and in what circumstances to deliver them to patients. In fact, Dr. Fairbairn investigated injectable opioid agonist therapy and brought it forward to a national clinical guideline, in collaboration with clinicians, researchers, and people with lived experience in substance use across Canada.
In 2021, Dr. Fairbairn was named the inaugural holder of the Philip Owen Professorship in Addiction Medicine at UBC. This opportunity is enabling her to provide leadership for integrated research and education programs to close the evidence-to-practice gap in the addiction system of care and improve outcomes for British Columbians with substance use disorders.
“Even though addiction is one of the most prevalent conditions in the general population and BC’s overdose crisis continues to worsen, the addiction system of care remains underfunded, fragmented, and difficult to access,” says Dr. Fairbairn. “Innovative solutions are urgently needed to increase training of health professionals in addiction care and develop effective treatments and refine clinical guidelines that can help more people. Every investment in this work makes a difference.”
The Philip Owen Professorship in Addiction Medicine was established at UBC in honour of former Vancouver Mayor Philip Owen and his commitment to finding novel and thoughtful ways to reduce harm among people struggling with addiction. During his time in office, Owen led the implementation of the Four Pillars drug strategy, which shifted the city’s stance on substance use away from a criminal justice issue towards a public health approach. “My father knew in his heart that he was doing the right thing from the get-go. To say as mayor ‘this is not something I should be taking on’ was not enough, it was not acceptable. The status quo was not acceptable,” says Chris Owen, son of former Vancouver mayor Philip Owen (1933-2021).