51ÁÔÆæ

Ryan Oland. Photo supplied.

Ryan Oland, ’00 MD, traces his family’s connection to the 51ÁÔÆæ all the way back to his grandparents’ era, when his grandfather embarked on a degree in engineering in 1927. While Kenneth James Crawford’s pursuit of that degree was interrupted by the Great Depression, his brief foray at the U of A started a near-century-long tradition.

Over the coming decades, Oland’s father and mother, then eventually Oland himself, all made their own treks north from the Medicine Hat area to pursue higher education. That deep throughline — and his own gratitude to the university for his medical education and subsequent career successes — has inspired Oland to give back by making the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry a beneficiary in his will.

“I had originally planned to leave money to the university as a whole,” says Oland, an emergency physician at the WestView Health Centre in Stony Plain where he became the Edmonton Zone’s youngest chief of medical staff in 2012 at age 36. “But the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry put me where I am today, so I decided to make sure that 100 per cent of the money actually goes there.” 

Oland wasn’t always going to be a doctor. He recalls many holiday dinners spent listening to his uncle and father’s colourful stories about their contracting work and might have become the fourth generation to join them. But with his parents’ encouragement to use his academic abilities in a different way — and his desire for a more stable and predictable career — he achieved early entry to the MD program at the U of A and his course was set. 

While stability might have been the main factor that drew him to medicine in the beginning, in the years since Oland has found increasing fulfilment in serving the community. “It is nice to be able to help people,” he says. “Actually probably one of the most rewarding parts of my workday is being able to help elderly people and their families negotiate and navigate the system." 

While Oland chuckles that TV may have led to the common misconception that an emergency physician’s career is all sexy drama and acute trauma — think George Clooney of ER fame — what keeps him coming back after 22 years of night shifts is the complex “thinker cases,” what he calls the “bread and butter” of emergency medicine.

What also inspires Oland is the chance to mentor so many of the next generation of emergency physicians. “It is part of the natural progression in the field of medicine to become a learner, master and then a teacher,” he says. “On occasion, learners will come back to me later on in their careers and say, ‘You might not have known it at the time, but you made a significant impression upon my work.’” Some have even gone on to surpass him on the career ladder, a point of great pride for him. 

An associate clinical professor in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry's Department of Emergency Medicine, Oland values the power of education and strongly believes that training in core skills is what will best address the shortage of all medical specialties — not just emergency physicians — in this province and beyond. And that training is not possible without other alumni coming forward, like he has, to share their expertise. It’s also not possible without funding — and it is this certainty that inspired him to include the faculty in his will. “I want to support core medical training, for example in the area of primary care — training that emphasizes practical skills,” he says. With the challenges of an overburdened health system, core education and training will go a long way to bringing more competent and prepared health professionals into the field and keeping them there, he says. 

As Oland begins to consider the next phase of his life, including eventual retirement, he is honoured to share his good fortune with the institution that gave him so much. “The simple truth is that the university has put me in the place where I am today."