Read the 2021 awards program

Dr. Sumantra Monty Ghosh

Double Honoree 2021

Addiction and Internal Medicine, Calgary

Dr. Monty Ghosh is a passionate advocate for vulnerable and marginalized people, determined to give voice to those whose voices are rarely heard. Through advocacy, compassion, and respect, he continually supports the motto “Nothing About Us Without Us.”

Dr. Ghosh completed his medical training at the University of Calgary in 2009, to which he has added specialized training in a number of areas, particularly in addiction medicine, and works as an assistant clinical professor both there and at the University of Alberta. He is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada (FRCPC) in Internal Medicine and has served with the Canadian Society of Addiction Medicine (CSAM) and been appointed president of the Section of Addiction Medicine.

“I am driven,” he says, “to facilitate change and create impactful improvements in social and health outcomes for my patients and to empower agencies to develop programs that fill gaps for vulnerable populations.” The communities he serves include Indigenous people, LGBTQ, refugees, people with a history of incarceration, addiction, homelessness, HIV, and Hepatitis C. He works with Collaborative Home and Health (CHH) in Calgary, which seeks health solutions for Calgary’s vulnerable population sector with multiple partner agencies such as Alpha House and The Drop In-Centre, and co-chairs the Canadian Network for the Health and Housing of the Homeless, which aims to facilitate national level knowledge sharing and cross-sectoral learning for social support sectors and to catalyze advocacy with the goal of ending homelessness. His work has been published in a variety of journals, and he has authored training programs in addiction medicine and treatment. He is a sought-after speaker who regularly educates physicians, allied health professionals, and the media about addiction medicine and Alberta’s vulnerable populations. He has received multiple grants and awards for his work, including the Patient Excellence Award from the Health Quality Council of Alberta and grants from the Calgary Health Trust and the Health Canada Substance Use and Addiction Program.

Dr. Ghosh believes strongly in community collaboration, and that includes making sure voices from the street are heard in program development and policy change. Positive change can only happen when we listen to people with lived experience of vulnerability. He has been called a community champion for the most disadvantaged citizens in Calgary.

Dr. Ian Mitchell

Respiratory Medicine, Calgary

Dr. Ian Mitchell has, for more than forty years, achieved and promoted excellence in the medical care of children and in medical bioethics. As a volunteer, he has sat with every Southern Alberta bereaved parent who has contacted the Sudden Infant Death Syndrome Calgary Society and answered their questions until they had no more.

Defying political authority and risking his own job, he led protests in the 1990s to protect the Alberta Children’s Hospital from closure as a stand-alone facility. Because of Dr. Mitchell and others, Southern Alberta children continue to benefit from a discrete medical facility that places the child at the center. Dr. Mitchell seems to awaken every morning asking himself, “How can I help children and their families today?” And then he acts––listening carefully to a baby’s lungs, teaching students, conducting research on pediatric conditions and complicated ethics issues, serving and directing organizations so that they might better serve children and their families.

He received his medical training in Scotland and came to Alberta in 1982. After his arrival, he was asked to volunteer with a SIDS family support group, created by the families themselves, as an unpaid advisor. Over the years, as clinicians involved in supporting SIDS families tried to learn one from another, Dr. Mitchell helped establish collaborations across Canada and internationally.

Through his volunteer and his professional work, he developed an interest in biomedical ethics, to which he has made extraordinary, exemplary, and sustained contributions that inspire others locally, nationally, and internationally. He not only teaches and writes about ethics, but he also acts in ethical and courageous ways––working with patients and their families, leading advocacy efforts, and pressing public officials to act to protect the health and wellbeing of Albertans.

Dr. Mitchell has won multiple awards for his work as a clinician, an advocate, and a teacher and mentor, including the Lorraine Award of Excellence in Respiratory Disease and Care from the Alberta Lung Association in 2003 and the Canadian Medical Association’s Dr. William Marsden Award in Medical Ethics in 2013, given to individuals who have demonstrated exemplary leadership, commitment, and dedication to the cause of advancing and promoting excellence in the field of medical ethics in Canada. For the latter award, he was described as exemplifying “insight, innovation, and fearlessness,” often basing his advocacy for children on the social determinants of health, motivated by the knowledge that children usually cannot advocate for themselves. Humble, industrious, incisive, brilliant, and courageous, Dr. Mitchell is living a life of service to children, their families, and the medical community in Southern Alberta, Canada and beyond.

The Committee on Achievement Awards recommended that the AMA confer special recognition in 2020 on specialists in Public Health and Preventive Medicine for their hard work during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their dedication to protect Albertans in such a crisis and under such pressure is remarkable and worthy of our deepest respect. We acknowledge their leadership contributions, not only in the wake of the pandemic, but also in the continuous collaborative efforts to promote health and well-being of Albertans through various public health initiatives, projects and programs.

This specialty area sometimes misses the profile that other specialties enjoy with the public. COVID-19 has brought them to the forefront as our daily guides to health and safety. Alberta’s Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. Deena Hinshaw and colleagues have been critical to Alberta’s response to the pandemic.

AMA salutes these colleagues for managing the tide of emerging evidence and crafting sound policy under extreme pressure. While COVID-19 grabbed the spotlight for much of 2020, the day to day work, year in and year out, of these specialists makes our province a safer place to live.

Dr. Vincent I.O. Agyapong

In 2016, despite having just been appointed Edmonton Zone Clinical Section Chief for Community Mental Health, Dr. Agyapong could not rest easy knowing that the people of Fort McMurray were suffering from trauma-related mental health issues, with only three psychiatrists in town and no services at all for children and youth except those sporadically provided via telehealth from Edmonton. So he volunteered to provide psychiatric consultation in Fort McMurray for one full week per month, adding to an already demanding schedule, until two additional psychiatrists were recruited last year. Since then, in order to meet the ongoing need for mental health services, he continues to provide psychiatric consultations, to support family physicians and to assist with the on-call program in Fort McMurray.

Not only does he do this with a full and demanding schedule in Edmonton, he also continues to volunteer in his home country of Ghana. In 2009, Ghana had only four resident psychiatrists for a population of over twenty million, and poor infrastructure for mental health care did little to encourage Ghanaian medical students to enter the field of psychiatry. Dr. Agyapong began travelling there annually to teach undergraduate medical students at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology at no cost to the university. Between 2009 and 2013, he delivered the bulk of the psychiatry curriculum at that institution, which had no psychiatrist on the faculty. He also launched a program to enable Ghanaian medical students to receive fully sponsored elective placements in psychiatry in Irish institutions, with 23 students so far having received sponsorship, and the number of psychiatrists in Ghana has subsequently increased from 4 to 18, with another 27 residents in psychiatry currently training with the Ghana College of Physicians and Surgeons.

In addition, in order to help address the treatment gap for mental health in Africa and elsewhere, Dr. Agyapong designed a curriculum for an international Masters Program in Mental Health Policy, Services, and Development that received accreditation from the Ghana Accreditation Board and the Academic Board of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology. He recruited volunteer faculty from the University of Alberta, University of Alabama, University of Dublin, Ahmadu Bello University and the University of Ghana to teach the program. It launched in the 2018/2019 academic year with 16 students from Ghana and Nigeria enrolled; the goal is to produce welltrained global mental health professionals who have received international education in the African and lower-and-middle-income-country context and can design, implement and evaluate global mental health programs and services to expand access to care. He volunteers his time to coordinate both the intensive residential and the online learning sessions of the program from Canada and travels to Ghana at his own cost twice a year during the intensive residential sessions.

Dr. Agyapong has demonstrated enormous compassion and a willingness—indeed, an eagerness—to go out of his way to care for people who would otherwise not have access to the care they need. The people of Alberta and Ghana, in particular, have benefitted greatly from his work on their behalf.

Dr. Debra L. Isaac

Dr. Debra Isaac is an accomplished clinician, educator, researcher and Clinical Professor at the University of Calgary, a Fellow of the Royal College of Canada in both Internal Medicine and Cardiology, with a subspecialty interest in echocardiography, heart failure and cardiac transplantation. She is the Director of Cardiac Transplantation and Mechanical Circulatory Support and the echocardiography lab Director at Calgary’s Rockyview Hospital.

In the early 1990s, she partnered with Dr. Wayne Warnica to establish the Cardiac Transplant Clinic in Calgary, creating a multidisciplinary transplant team that could provide full assessment of patients, present them for listing for transplantation and provide all necessary post-transplant care. This was the first program of its kind in Canada, and it has subsequently been replicated at other Canadian centres. She was instrumental in the establishment of the Canadian Cardiac Transplant Network (CCTN) in 2001, where she was the first executive secretary (2001–2008), and then President (2008–2014). From 2009 to 2016, she was also the representative for cardiac transplant on the Organ Donation and Transplant Executive Advisory Committee for the Canadian Blood Services. During that time, she was instrumental in the development of national policies for cardiac transplant listing, organ allocation, organ sharing and outcomes assessments, advancing the practice of cardiac transplantation nationally and bringing Canada international recognition as a significant contributor to the science and practice of cardiac transplantation. She currently serves as the Director of the Cardiac Transplant Program for Southern Alberta and as medical director for Mechanical Circulatory support.

About six years ago, she made her first trip to Guyana, a small South American country with less than a million people, few cardiac facilities or services, and no ability to diagnose or treat people with cardiac conditions. Dr. Isaac arranged for used echocardiography machines to be transported from Calgary to Guyana and began the Guyana Echocardiography Education program (now the Guyana Program to Advance Cardiac Care), developing a curriculum and training physicians and technologists. The program is now in its sixth year, and over 8,000 echocardiograms have been provided to date; Dr. Isaac reviews these cases with clinicians in Guyana to provide ongoing support.

More than a quarter of those tested suffer from severe cardiovascular disease, and the condition is particularly prevalent among children. Dr. Isaac couldn’t stop at diagnosing life-threatening conditions without the ability to treat them, so she began to develop a pediatric cardiology clinic, which has saved many children who would otherwise have remained undiagnosed and untreated. The program also established the country’s first heart failure clinic. She has worked with all levels of government in Guyana, fought her way past seemingly endless obstacles, and faced problems with theft and vandalism of medical equipment, building supplies and drugs brought by the team to treat cardiac patients. Her tenacity and determination have made it all possible. Countless patients, both in Canada and in Guyana, are alive because of her.