Launch of CursUS-santé, the first network of its kind in Quebec

For the first time in Quebec, health education will be offered to the general public in French, by the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences of the Université de Sherbrooke. The first session, which will be held this fall in the Eastern Townships, will concern cancer. CursUS-santé, which will debut in the Eastern Townships, is the result of collaboration between the Faculty and the Sherbrooke Health Expertise Centre (CESS), thanks to financial support from Pfizer Canada.

CursUS-santé will offer two sessions a year, each on a current topic in medicine. This educational program is intended for people of all ages wishing to increase their health knowledge.

"This is part of our social responsibility", says Prof. Réjean Hébert, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences of the Université de Sherbrooke. "Our mandate as a teaching institution is to ensure the rapid transfer of knowledge and expertise, not only for better care and services, but also directly to the general public, which wants to be better informed."

Fall 2007 in the Eastern Townships: "Understanding Cancer Better"

The CursUS-santé session entitled "Understanding Cancer" will be offered to Eastern Townshippers in the form of six 2-hour talks (question period included) on Tuesday evenings, starting on October 16. The talks will be given by physicians who teach in the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences and by clinical professionals from the Centre Hospitalier de l'Université de Sherbrooke (CHUS). Anyone interested in taking action regarding their health through better medical knowledge is invited to register.

Some of the many topics that will be covered are what cancer is, if it is possible to lower one's risk of cancer, what kinds of treatments there are and their effects, how to live with cancer, and what advances have been made by research.

As pointed out by Dr. Roch Bernier, General Director of the CESS, this innovative project greatly aroused the centre's interest, and the CESS enthusiastically agreed to carry it out. Inspired by the concept of the mini-med school in the United States, which was created by Dr. J. John Cohen in the 1990s at the University of Colorado in Denver, this is the first French-language version of "mini-faculties of medicine", for which the name "CursUS-santé" was chosen. Additional information is available at http://www.cursus-sante.ca.

It is thanks to Pfizer Canada's involvement and a 5-year financial commitment on its part that this project will come to fruition this fall. "In line with its guiding aspiration of 'Working for a healthier world', Pfizer Canada is proud to become CursUS-santé's partner because communicating science to people has never been so important. More and more, they want to understand everything pertaining to their health and take part in the decisions that concern them," says Dr. Bernard Prigent, Vice-President and Medical Director, Pfizer Canada.

Marie Toupin, Director of the Quebec Cancer Foundation's Regional Centre, added the following: "The Quebec Cancer Foundation, too, is proud to be affiliated with this project, which is bringing together a number of key players from the Sherbrooke health-care community and which perfectly complements the information services and documentation that we provide. We believe in the importance of offering support and information, not only to cancer patients and their families, but to the general public as well."

The Sherbrooke Health Expertise Centre was created by three health partners (the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences of the Université de Sherbrooke, the Centre hospitalier universitaire de Sherbrooke, and the Health and Social Services Centre - Sherbrooke Geriatric University Institute), and its mission is threefold: to sustain the development of practical health knowledge, to optimize the ability to export this knowledge, and to propose strategies for improving the health and social services system through the concrete application of health knowledge.

Pfizer Canada Inc. is the Canadian operation of Pfizer Inc, the world's leading pharmaceutical company. Pfizer discovers, develops, manufactures and markets prescription medicines for humans and animals. Pfizer Inc. invests more than US$7 billion annually in R&D to discover and develop innovative life-saving and life-enhancing medicines in a wide range of therapeutic areas, including arthritis, cardiovascular disease, endocrinology, HIV/AIDS, infectious disease, neurological disease, oncology, ophthalmology and smoking cessation. For additional information, please visit the website www.pfizer.ca.

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