Inspiring rural youth to consider healthcare careers through an interprofessional healthcare traveling roadshow.

There are well-documented shortages of healthcare providers in rural and remote communities worldwide, and these shortages correlate with inequitable health outcomes for rural peoples. Despite a wide array of efforts to remedy the issue, these shortages persist to this day. The Healthcare Traveling Roadshow (HCTRS) is a grassroots initiative that began in 2010 to help address the shortage of healthcare providers in rural communities throughout British Columbia.

"Juggle the different hats we wear": enacted strategies for negotiating boundaries in overlapping relationships.

Despite agreement that teaching on professional boundaries is needed, the design of health profession curricula is challenged by a lack of research on how boundaries are maintained and disagreement on where boundaries should be drawn. Curricula constrained by these challenges can leave graduates without formal preparation for practice conditions. Dual role or overlapping relationships are an example: they continue to be taught as boundary crossings amidst mounting evidence that they must be routinely navigated in small, interconnected communities.

Context-dependent bioactivity of versican fragments.

Versican (VCAN) proteolysis and the accumulation of VCAN fragments occur in many developmental and disease processes, affecting extracellular matrix (ECM) structure and cell phenotype. Little is known about the significance of proteolysis and the roles of fragments, or how this ECM remodeling affects the microenvironment and phenotype of diseased cells. G1-DPEAAE fragments promote aspects of epithelial-mesenchymal transitioning in developing and diseased cells, resulting in cell migration.

Versican: a novel modulator of hepatic fibrosis.

Little is known about the deposition and turnover of proteoglycans in liver fibrosis, despite their abundance in the extracellular matrix. Versican plays diverse roles in modulating cell behavior in other fibroproliferative diseases, but remains poorly described in the liver. Hepatic fibrosis was induced by carbon tetrachloride treatment of C57BL/6 mice over 4 weeks followed by recovery over a 28-day period.