UBC CARDIAC SURGERY EXECUTIVE
Leadership Team
Dr. Jamil Bashir
UBC Head, Division of Cardiac Surgery, Surgical Director, Laser Lead Extraction and Device Implantation Clinical Associate Professor of Surgery, UBC BCMA Section Head
Dr Jamil Bashir is a Cardiovascular and Transplant surgeon at St. Paul’s Hospital and Vancouver General Hospital with a primary academic interest in heart failure, cardiac implantable electronic devices and laser lead extraction. He is a full Clinical Professor in the Department of Surgery at the University of British Columbia and the Director of the Lead Extraction Program. The St. Paul’s Hospital lead extraction program is a Western Canadian resource that manages patients from Manitoba west and is the largest program in Canada. Dr Bashir was the creator of the P6 program which has been instrumental in a complete reorganization of pacemaker device care in the province with a focus on quality.
In addition to winning the Moshier Memorial Gold medal as the top graduate from the University of Alberta Medical School, Jamil did a dual fellowship of complex device surgery in Goteborg Sweden and holds a certificate in Aortic Surgery from Houston Texas.
Dr Bashir is the principal investigator for the CLEAR (Canadian Lead Extraction Risk Study) with 2500 patients and was instrumental in the creation of the ongoing ATLAS randomized trial comparing risk of complications between transvenous and subcutaneous defibrillators.
Dr. Peter Skarsgard
Head, VCH Division of Cardiovascular Surgery
Dr. James Abel
Head, PHC Division of Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgery Clinical Professor of Surgery, University of British Columbia. Associate Head, UBC Division of Cardiovascular Surgery
Dr Abel completed General Surgery and Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgery at the University of Toronto, and joined the Division of Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgery at St. Paul’s Hospital in 1993. He headed the Cardiac Transplant Program from 1996 until 2001, and has a clinical interest in higher risk coronary revascularization, left ventricular remodeling, and valve repair and replacement surgery as an alternative to transplantation. He was the first to do concomitant radiofrequency ablation for atrial fibrillation in the open heart in BC and is a leader in cardiac surgical training. Since arriving in BC he has been involved in outcomes analysis with the BC Cardiac Surgical Registry, and led the Cardiac Surgical Working Group of Cardiac Services British Columbia which developed and transitioned the Registry to the electronic web-based HeartIS system used today. He chairs the Canadian Cardiovascular Society Cardiac Surgery Quality Indicator group which, in partnership with CIHI, releases annual national cardiac surgical outcomes publicly.