BY JAMIU BUSARI (@JOBUSAR)
Dr. Anjali Menezes, MBBS, MClinEd, FHEA, CCFP (She/Her)
Co-Director, Differential Attainment Research (DARe) Group Collaborative http://www.DAReGroup.ca
Scholar, McMaster Health Education, Research Innovation & Theory (MERIT), McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada
Affiliate Investigator, Bruyère Research Institute, Ottawa
Community Family Physician, Hamilton, ON, Canada
Dr Anjali Menezes is a community family physician (general practitioner) who specializes in trauma-informed care, intimate partner violence, and racialized medicine. She completed her medical training at The University of East Anglia (UK) in 2018 where she also obtained her masters in clinical education 2017. Dr. Menezes went on to do her residency training in family medicine in Canada at McMaster University in 2021 followed by an academic family practice fellowship at Western University in 2022 . Since 2024, she has run her own solo practice at a family owned pharmacy in Hamilton, ON and shares the clinic space with another family physician. In her spare time, she mentors international medical graduates in her practice, a volunteer role she feels is vital as an international medical graduate herself noting “there are barriers that specifically impact immigrant physicians in Canada: you need experience to understand the system, but without money or connections, this is impossible to get. Having my own practice outside of the institution allows me to open up those doors.” She has also held leadership roles at the postgraduate medical education level as the Family Medicine Postgraduate Anti-Racism Advisor and Director of the Racialized Medical Learner Mentorship program.
Anjali is a scholar at McMaster Health Education, Research Innovation & Theory (MERIT), McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada where she collaborates and advises on scholarship in medical education, mentorship, and differentials in attainment. She is also the co-Director of the DARe Group Collaborative group of exclusively Black, Indigenous and Racialized scholars studying and working to dismantle the systemic barriers that limit Racialized medical learners from reaching their full potential (“the attainment gap”) The DARe Group became one of very few safe spaces for differentially racialized scholars to build community and a critical consciousness to support equity scholarship in medical education. As a Racialized clinician herself, it is one of the few settings she feels that the institutional and structural forces that uphold racism were centered as the focus for system transformation.
Dividing her Time
Dr. Menezes was asked how she distributes her time across her various clinical, teaching, research, and administrative activities. In response she said “ I spend 3 and a half days a week in clinic and about 30% of the time I am teaching and mentoring international medical graduates. These are doctors who got their medical degrees outside of Canada and are working towards getting their license to practice medicine here”. Anjali’s scholarly work is in equity scholarship and she focuses on racial differentials in attainment, race-based data collection, racism in medicine, and the practical applications of critical theory to quantitative data analysis. As It has now become a specialized field in the health professions, Anjali is regularly asked to consult and speak on the topic. She estimates that 40% of her time is devoted to these scholarly activities
A substantial amount of Dr Menezes’ time is also spent in teaching. For example, she spends about half a day a week planning the Social, Cultural, and Humanistic Dimensions of Healthcare curriculum for the medical school at McMaster, and three hours a week as a small group discussion facilitator for the same curriculum. Once a month she spends a half day sitting on the Hamilton Police Service Board where she serves as the citizen appointee to the local civilian governing body for her municipal police service. This is a very public role she says. “ I often attend local community events in my evenings and weekends and community members and organizations often contact me to meet and discuss their concerns about safety in our community. It is during these meetings and events that I see how education, health, social circumstances, and safety intersect”.
While she technically spends the other 1.5 days doing scholarly or community activities, these often spill over into her evenings and weekends. Still, she fully enjoys the diversity in her work. She explains, “I love my work, and I am close friends with almost everyone I collaborate with. The political and social activism I engage in also relates to my desires to live in a more equitable community and world, so the line between my work and personal life is very blurred. While it certainly keeps work fun, it can also lead to burnout”.
When asked how she enjoys the diversity in her career, Dr Menezes shared that Everything she does aligns with her own personal values, her “Northern Light(s)”. Asked why, her response was “I want to make the world a better, safer, and more equitable place for my patients, the learners I support, my family, and myself. When I list off the broad items on my CV, try to summarize my work or my “typical day” it can sound like chaos (and it often is!), but there are uniting themes to everything that I do: it is community building, relationship mapping, and human connection”. She also notes that the diversity in her work is one way she has adapted as someone with ADHD. “My brain thrives when there is a little bit of chaos.” Dr Menezes’s equity scholarship and community activism frequently focus on structures and institutions that uphold racism. She also loves teaching and finds racial differentials in attainment fascinating, however, she spends most of her time as a family physician, the profession she had dreamed of since she was 16 years old. Anjali happily shares the wonders of family practice with medical learners. She says “Nothing fills my heart more than seeing them choose family practice as a specialty themselves”.
Managing difficulties
Dr Menezes was asked about how she experiences the challenges associated with the diversity in her role as a CE. She responded that the blurring of the personal and the professional aspects of her work, including the social dinners and hanging out in her spare time, are potential threats to burnout. To mitigate this, she has informal rules with many of her friends: we don’t discuss work at social gatherings outside of work, because it’s so easy to start planning a paper or a workshop when we are feeling energized while sharing a pint on a patio. Some things that have helped us are having an open shared Word document (“the Parking Lot”) where we can write down a thought to chat about during a “work” call the next day. When asked about how she avoids burnout while holding so many roles, she highlights the importance of self-complexity, “its the number of identities we hold and ways we see ourselves. Having things important to you that are outside of medicine is essential.” For her these are her family, community, her cat Dora, and being a bubblegum ice cream connoisseur. She often speaks openly about mental health and wellbeing noting “it was scary at first but being a little vulnerable opened the doors for colleagues and friends to share their struggles too – and in doing so, we are able to share tips and tricks we have learned to help bolster our communal resilience – true mutuality!”
Three tips for junior CEs:
- Pace yourself and practice saying no!
There is far too much work to do and far too few people to do it: If you burn out, nothing will ever get done. Know that all work can always wait – from the email that can wait until the morning, the phone call until after you finish sipping your morning coffee in peace, or the paper that can be written next week. - Define your own Northern Light
Both medical practice and medical education are wildly expansive fields. Especially as a new grad, it can feel so tempting to say yes to every and any opportunity presented to us. But those friendly forces also have the potential to steer us, of course, and the ballooning of work in a capitalistic society can easily obscure your roadmap. If you don’t remain cognizant of the directions you are being pulled in, you can wind up years later with a portfolio of work defining an area of expertise you never wanted. You may even realize you didn’t prioritize the things you wanted to in life. ITime is a finite thing. - Nurture your heart
The work we do requires us to have hearts – from our clinical work, to teaching, to scholarship. Loving what you do is important. But to love, we need to care for our hearts. We can’t do good work with broken or jaded hearts. Identify your community, your people, the places, and the things that feed your soul – find your home. From my experience with numerous intersecting marginalized identities, I have come to feel that a sense of empowerment and purpose comes from being labeled as coming from the margins. The margins made me the person I am today. The margins are where the people I hold closest to my heart reside. The narratives, the lived experiences, the food, the culture, the music, the love, the strength, and the purpose that drives my work – all of it I draw from the margins. I trace my roots to my home at the margins and remind myself every day that no flower can survive without its roots. That reminds me to step aside from my work and wander home more often than I have.
The views and opinions expressed in this post are those of the interviewee and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of The University of Ottawa. For more details on our site disclaimers, please see our ‘About’ page