Today, Butt is a second-year student in the MD Program at the University of Toronto’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine, with plans to specialize in family and emergency medicine, and hopes to be a clinician-educator and global health practitioner. 

What changed Butt’s career path? Hard work and persistence, no doubt — he keeps the poem ‘Do it Anyway,’ often attributed to Mother Teresa, on his desk — but Butt also credits Temerty Medicine’s Community of Support program for helping him believe he could become a physician. 

“I used to feel I had no place in medicine, partly because I had volunteered in hospitals and did not see myself reflected in the workforce,” Butt says. “My mentors in the Community of Support were compassionate and understanding, and the diversity in their backgrounds helped me see a way forward in the field,” he says. 

The program supports under-represented students who aspire to study medicine, health professions, rehabilitation and basic sciences — especially those who are Indigenous, Black, Filipino or economically disadvantaged, and who identify as having a disability.

Program offerings include admissions information, experiential opportunities in research and leadership, and application-related support such as MCAT test and interview preparation. 

Butt joined the Community of Support program RASI (Research Application Support Initiative), through which he gained medical research work experience, and SASI (Supporting Applications, Supporting Interviews), which pairs prospective with current MD students who guide candidates on medical school applications. 

Inspired by those experiences and grateful for the opportunity to study medicine — acceptance to medical school felt like winning the lottery, he says — Butt now volunteers with Community of Support as a mentor. 

“It’s been very meaningful as the person on the other side of those beneficial relationships. I want to give back and help foster change, starting with youth. To me, mentorship is part of what medicine is, or at least what it should be,” Butt says. 

Involving physicians and students to level the playing field was a founding idea behind the Community of Support, says Ike Okafor, a Senior Officer for Service Learning and Diversity Outreach who founded the program and has led it since 2015. 

“Each one of our initiatives represents an idea that has been developed with current students and the communities we serve,” Okafor says. “None of what we do would be possible without outstanding student leaders who take on roles as tutors and coordinators, as well as physicians and support from the communities we serve.”  

The program has seen remarkable success and growth. Since 2015, over 440 matriculants from the Community of Support have entered medical school, including 23 per cent of the second-year medical school class. This past summer, more than 1,000 students engaged with program opportunities at Temerty Medicine and other North American schools, and Okafor says new program growth will target learners interested in basic and rehabilitation sciences. 

Enrolment of Black medical students in particular has spiked at U of T recently. The university accepted at least 14 students who identified as Black to the MD Program in 2018, and at least 18 in 2022. 

That success is attributable to a two-pronged strategy at Temerty Medicine that includes the Community of Support but also the Black Student Application Program, an optional entry stream that requires Black applicants to write a personal essay, and which enables file review and admission interviews by members of the Black community. 

Most BSAP students at Temerty Medicine have come through the Community of Support, and other Canadian medical schools are now emulating that model, supporting Black students both before and during the application process. 

Okafor and colleagues at Temerty Medicine have partnered with Western, Ottawa, McMaster, McGill and Dalhousie universities on program delivery, and have supported program development at universities in British Columbia and Alberta.  

This fall, McGill University admitted 24 Black medical students through its Black Candidate Pathway; they all accessed McGill’s own Community of Support program, says Iyman Ahmed, a former Project Manager for both programs who now works in the management consulting industry. 

Ahmed says the structure of programs at Temerty Medicine were formative in the creation of customized programs at McGill, and she cites U of T’s numbers — an increase in Black medical students from one to eight per cent over four years — as key to the internal funding that helped launch the McGill programs. 

Similarly, at the University of Calgary’s Cumming School of Medicine, a new Black Applicant Admissions Process helped enable the entry of eight students who identify as Black to the MD Program this year. 

Mairi Babey, a Program Coordinator with the Office of Professionalism, Equity and Diversity at the Cumming School, says the U of T programs were the main influence in how the school set up its Black applicant stream and Support to Entry Program, which like the Community of Support offers MCAT materials and test prep, as well as mentorship, to students from underrepresented groups. 

“The Community of Support program in Toronto is really the envy, given its success and the number of partnerships they’ve established with Black, Indigenous and other health organizations,” Babey said. 

And while it’s too early to tell whether the Support to Entry Program has had a direct and sustained impact on the demographics of MD students at the Cumming School, Babey said, the involvement of more than three dozen student volunteers as mentors in the new program has been heartening. 

“Our mentors have been very active, they really want to give back,” Babey says. “That bodes well for our MD Program and ultimately for patients, who will benefit from having physicians who understand their needs because they’ve walked similar paths in life.” 

"Residency is already an intense and busy experience and with the other pressures I faced, things were becoming untenable,” they said. “Rather than wait until I couldn’t manage any more, I knew I needed to be proactive.” 

Despite their initial apprehension to ask for help, Morgan reached out to Temerty Medicine’s Office of Learner Affairs (OLA), created early this year through a merger of the Office of Health Professions Student Affairs and the Postgraduate Wellness Office.  

Morgan worked with a learner life specialist to develop a short-term plan to take one day a week for their own medical appointments and family responsibilities, while continuing their training. 

“Through OLA, I discovered options I hadn’t known about before and was able to maintain my wellbeing without disrupting my education,” they said. “Without the support I received, I wouldn’t be where I am now.” 

Before OLA’s inception, residents and clinical fellows in postgraduate programs didn’t have access to the same level of support as students in the MD and MD/PhD programs. The merger allows OLA to offer services more equitably across the medical education spectrum.  

It also offers support to students enrolled in medical radiation sciences, occupational therapy and physician assistant programs.  

“OLA is designed to be a safe and neutral space for learners and its processes are confidential, trauma-informed and guided by the principles of equity, diversity and inclusion,” says Tony Pignatiello, Associate Dean, Learner Affairs, who is also an Associate Professor of psychiatry at Temerty Medicine. 

Broadly, OLA’s core support services can be categorized as academic, professional and personal.  

Learners choose the services they want to access, and staff are available to help guide their choices. The office can also remain connected to learners for the duration of their academic programs and connect them to an external organization that offers additional services as those needs arise.  

About half of MD Program graduates continue their postgraduate medical training at Temerty Medicine.  

“If learners struggle in their undergraduate studies, we can now offer them continuity if they want to access our services again,” Pignatiello says. “Their files don’t follow them but remain available if they return to us, which means they don’t have to repeat their histories.” 

The office is an independent unit and keeps its files separate from the Faculty’s academic records. As well, members of OLA’s team aren’t involved in educational evaluations nor do they sit on any selection committees. 

Faculty members who want to learn more about supporting learners through challenges can also access OLA. For example, if they are concerned that learners may be experiencing academic, personal or mental health difficulties because they’ve been missing lectures or haven’t been responding as usual, the office can provide guidance on how to approach the situation.  

The OLA team has space in the Naylor Building on the St. George Campus and in the Terrence Donnelly Health Sciences Complex at the Mississauga Academy of Medicine. Appointments are available online and in-person.  

“However learners make their way to us, no door is the wrong door,” Pignatiello says. 

*Name has been changed to respect the learner’s privacy. 

** Use of ‘they’ as a pronoun is for anonymity, not to indicate a gender identity. 

From this insight came a template that streamlined sharing of biological materials for COVID-19 research and related data between institutions in the Toronto Academic Health Science Network (TAHSN).  

The flexibility and simplicity of the document allowed researchers in Toronto to form new teams and quickly address important questions on SARS-CoV-2, and soon universities, hospitals and public health agencies across Canada began using it. 

Now, the university and affiliated hospitals have created a new template to facilitate exchange of routine, non-COVID-19 research data and materials across TAHSN institutions and research groups. 

“From our experience with the COVID-19 D/MTA template, we’ve seen that it can be very effective and so we wanted to extend it to beyond COVID research,” said Derek Newton, Assistant Vice-President, Innovation, Partnerships and Entrepreneurship at U of T.  

The new agreement can be used for the transfer of reagents, biological materials including human- and animal-derived samples, and research data. 

​​"This collaboration was first conceptualized as a rapid response to the emerging threat of COVID-19 at the time, and its wider adoption as a rapid response research model is great to see,” said Brad Wouters, Executive Vice President, Science and Research, University Health Network and chair of the TAHSN research committee.  

"The initiative helps researchers working hand-in-hand in our local life sciences community here in Toronto, removing barriers to research, strengthening our ability to work together and thus bringing more benefit to patients," Wouters said. 

Previously, each researcher aiming to share this type of data or materials needed to go through a process that involved development of an agreement, legal reviews and negotiations before a transfer could occur. 

The new document, called the TAHSN Simple Data/Material Transfer and Use Agreement, provides a ready-to-use template with terms of use and ownership already agreed upon by all participating institutions. It functions like an express pass to fast-track research partnerships and reduce the administrative burden of simple inter-institutional transfers.  

For infectious disease researchers at U of T, simplified, harmonized transfer agreements are crucial for mobilizing quickly to address new challenges. 

“Having these standardized agreements in place means studies can start quickly, putting our research community in a position to contribute findings that can impact the course of an outbreak,” said Natasha Christie-Holmes, Director, Strategy and Partnerships at the Emerging and Pandemic Infections Consortium, a partnership among U of T and five Toronto hospitals. 

“It allows researchers to focus more on the science and answering critical and urgent questions, and less on paperwork,” said Christie-Holmes, who recently helped EPIC coordinate a rapid research response against monkeypox. 

As science becomes increasingly multi-disciplinary and team-based, the team behind the new template hope that a better process for sharing data and materials will give Toronto a competitive advantage when it comes to attracting talent and driving innovation.  

“When researchers see how quick and easy it can be to transfer materials and data, they’re going to want to engage with each other even more,” said Mark Taylor, Director, Commercialization at UHN. 

The desire to improve collaborations was what drove UHN and U of T to co-lead the development of the new template on behalf of the local ecosystem, Taylor said. “The more our institutions can work together more efficiently, the stronger Toronto and our nation in general will be as the go-to destination for biomedical research.”