Family Medicine Residency Site: Abbotsford-Mission

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
e. e. cummings, 1894 – 1962

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

When we use positive words, such as love, we can affect the brain’s frontal lobes and improve cognitive reasoning. Learn more via Neurologist Dr. Amber Mitchell on The Power of Love.

Do you know a medical student or resident who is passionate about improving our health care system and advocates for it? Nominate them for Doctors of BC’s Changemaker Award and give them the recognition they deserve.

The Changemaker Award honours one medical student and one medical resident who is leading change in health care through grassroots political or medical advocacy.

Each winner will be presented with $1,000 and an engraved plaque at the Awards Ceremony taking place during the Doctors of BC’s Annual General Meeting, June 1, 2019. Winners will also be featured in the BC Medical Journal and on the Doctors of BC website.

Submissions are due April 5, 2019.

Learn more and nominate here!

In the surfing community I grew up in, we would wake up at dawn and listen to the local radio station’s “Know Before You Go” surf report to hear the latest conditions. Not much has changed! Given our extreme weather we’ve experienced, I’ve posted a series of links that I reference before heading out on the roads, mountains, water, snow, or ice. It’s important to be prepared!

• DriveBC Traveller Information System. No internet access? Call 1-800-550-4997 for BC road information 24 hours a day.
• BC Highway: Webcams
• Accuweather
• Windfinder (comprehensive site for wind, waves, and weather). For Abbotsford: click here and then access the forecast, super forecast, report, wind statistics, and webcams.
• Public Weather Alerts for Canada
• Avalanche Conditions in Canada
• Marine Forecasts & Warnings for Canada
• Ice Report for climbers via Gravsports
• Rock Climbing & Bouldering via the Crag

Recommendations
Get Prepared in Severe Storms via Government of Canada
Winter Driving Tips via Canada Safety Council

One final note, practice putting on your tire chains in your driveway before attempting it on snowy, slippery roadside conditions. Here’s a short video on it.

Warm regards,

Jacqueline

“A first-of-its-kind pilot project is underway at St. Paul’s ED, in collaboration with the VCH Regional Addiction Program, providing opioid overdose patients with takeaway doses of suboxone upon discharge. Patients are given a three day supply of the opioid substitute treatment, along with instructions on how to take the medication. Patients must be in a sufficient state of withdrawal to start Suboxone. By letting patients take the dose with them, the barrier to treatment is reduced for patients uncomfortable with hospital stays.”
Learn more here at BC Emergency Medicine Network.

“Amatoxins in Amanita phalloides, commonly known as the death cap mushroom, are responsible for 90% of the world’s mushroom-related fatalities. The most deadly amatoxin for humans is α-amanitin, a bicyclic octapeptide that irreversibly binds RNA polymerase II, thus preventing protein synthesis and causing cell death. Three recent poisoning cases in British Columbia show how the death cap can be easily mistaken for edible mushrooms such as the puffball and the paddy straw mushroom.”

More on The World’s Most Poisonous Mushroom, Amanita Phalloides, is growing in BC.
Issue: BCMJ, vol. 61 , No. 1 , January February 2019 , Pages 20-24 Clinical Articles
By:  Maxwell Moor-Smith, BSc  Raymond Li, BSc(Pharm), MSc  Omar Ahmad, MD, FRCPC

“In different environments, people can judge you by the way you look or talk, by the color of your skin, and so on, and you can’t please everyone. Therefore, I always treat my mind as a garden, and focus on the beautiful flowers in it, discarding all the negatives, because people and their opinions can get to you very easily. Sometimes, I do feel tired and exhausted, but I never reach a dead end, because I feel that if there is a will, there is a way. And you need to surround yourself with people who, even if they haven’t excelled in their own education or career, really believe in you, no matter what. It’s because you need that unconditional trust and love. And once you have a mission in life that is a light to carry you forward, you won’t even notice the obstacles and the challenges anymore.”

Dr. Hayat Sindi, Saudi Arabian medical scientist and one of the first female members of the Consultative Assembly of Saudi Arabia, on Leading the Way. More on International Day of Women and Girls in Science.

Artful Medicine: Art’s Power to Enrich Patient Care (2017) is an edX tuition-free course designed by Dr. Fred J. Schiffman at Brown University’s Warren Alpert School of Medicine. The course is archived so you can enrol at any time and complete the course at your own pace.

“Health professions educators often feel isolated inside academic institutions, powerless to fight for the changes they believe necessary. CoPs are an efficient strategy to gather faculty members committed to teaching and learning activities while creating a safe and trusting environment.”

More on Twelve Tips for Implementing a Community of Practice for Faculty Development by Marco Antonio de Carvalho-Filho, René A. Tio, & Yvonne Steinert

“The Women’s Health Institute designed three integrated practice units, one each for pelvic floor disorders, chronic pelvic pain, and vulvar disorders. We chose the IPU model because it surrounds a patient with the expertise to treat her condition and holistically meet her needs. Circling the providers around a woman in a single clinical setting also reduces inefficiencies in care coordination for the subspecialist, patient, and her family.”

Rebecca Rogers, MD, Haley Gardiner, MPH, CHES, Stephanie Nutt, MA, MPA & Amy Young, MD in An Innovative Approach to Treating Complex Gynecologic Conditions

What I love about this piece is it made me ponder what informs and structures an undergraduate or post-graduate curriculum. Maybe we need to design, build, and illustrate our curriculum in this concentric circle model to illuminate the internal and external factors and agents that impact the delivery of care and their proximity to the patient’s experience and outcome. I think taking that approach would educate the learner on the systems that influence a patient’s journey as well as help them identify where gaps or issues exist. Furthermore, the learner better understands the meaning of their role and how their care is positioned within the larger context of treating complex conditions.

Warm regards,

Jacqueline

#RethinkingCurriculumDesignAndMapping