The CIP is a national program, created by the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada to address a lack of attention by many Canadian medical schools to the development of physicians who are experts in clinical research processes.
Clinical investigation involves testing questions that arise from actual patient care.
It is crucial that we train residents for clinical investigation because there are critical research areas that are only seen in humans or only present themselves in a clinical setting. These things simply would not come up in an exclusive lab environment. Training clinician-investigators at Dalhousie, rather than sending them to centres outside the province or country, is expected to increase the likelihood that they will then practice at Dalhousie's teaching hospitals. Paul Johnson and Jean-Fran ois Legare, both from the Dalhousie Medical School's Department of Surgery, will be the first residents to participate in the CIP at Dalhousie.