Seeking a cure for heath-care system
Visiting his family in rural China helps fuel University of Calgary medical student Yan Yu’s drive to make a difference in the world.
Yu’s father was born in the slums of China and he studied his way out of abject poverty, eventually immigrating to Canada with his family.
Yu arrived in Calgary at age nine and, today, the 23-year-old Rhodes Scholar often thinks about how different his life could have been.
“I could have been that rural Chinese farm boy but I’m not. Instead, I’m living in a prosperous, rich, industrialized nation with a proper education and lots of supports behind me,” he says. “If I don’t take full advantage of that to do what I can to improve the state of the world, then I would feel so miserable.”
In his short life, Yu has strived to make the biggest impact he can, and plans to continue as his education advances.
At 21, he founded the Calgary Guide to Understanding Disease, an open-source education tool that features simple charts and plain language to aid medical students in understanding disease. The free guide has been downloaded more than 50,000 times in more than 100 countries.
This fall Yu will move to England to study at Oxford as one of only 11 Canadian 2014 Rhodes Scholars.
At the prestigious institution, he’ll most likely study for an MBA and a master’s degree in public policy, a field he’s chosen because he ultimately wants to improve Canada’s health-care system — when he’s not practising medicine as a family doctor or teaching medical students.
He sees the elite education as a path to help him learn about the health-care system, outside the field of medicine, and eventually work with the private sector to implement system-wide improvements.
“As with any good system, it can always be improved. I’m going to try to do what I can to increase the adoption of electronic medical records and reduce wait times,” he said.
He finds joy in both advocating for health-care improvement, as he already has with the Calgary Guide to Understanding Disease, and working alongside patients.
“Based on these experiences I’ve had working with people, there’s nothing more meaningful than medicine,” he says.