Family Medicine Residency Site: Abbotsford-Mission

“By looking closely at works of art that portray empathy in human interaction, caregivers can discover their common humanity with patients. Caregivers can also hone observation skills that help paint a portrait of a patient as a person and not a collection of symptoms, lab tests, and scans. Through presence at the patient’s side, unmediated by technology, a caregiver can make the patient feel cared for in addition to being treated.” ~ Dr. Fred J. Schiffman

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

“Rather than delivering patients serially to one exam room after another, each owned by a different provider, we made the patients the owner of their own rooms, and instead, circulated the providers to the patients.”

Stacey Chang, Executive Director & Founder of the Dell Institute for Health on Nobody Wants a Waiting Room

Informed by the Integrated Practice Unit structure, Stacey Chang and his Design Institute team completely revitalized the patient and healthcare provider’s experience in their new clinics and physically eliminated the waiting room (yes, you read that correctly). Kudos to the courageous and collaborative efforts of @DellMedSchool + @FineArtsUT. #GoLonghorns #MustRead #GameChanger

Last night I watched Alex Honnold’s Free Solo. Wow. So many pearls from this movie. What stood out for me is that we all, probably on some level, have a wall we’d like to climb. I took note of Honnold’s methods that helped him accomplish one of the greatest athletic achievements in our time. Here’s what I gathered:

1. Surround Yourself with the Right People. A team comprised of trusted experts can offer specific and constructive feedback and provide emotional support.
2. Practice. Practice. Practice. Prior to free soloing a route, Honnold repeatedly climbs it with ropes and a companion. He plans every move and takes meticulous notes describing everything from the feel of the granite to where he’ll place his fingers and toes.
3. Mental Rehearsal. He visualizes the experience of climbing the wall and how he needs to move through each pitch.
4. Attitude Towards Risk. Honnold invests his energy in what is required of him to achieve success as opposed to focusing on failure.
5. Find a Confidence Builder. For Honnold, it was testing himself on other walls that were challenging and achievable.
6. Work Through Your Fear. Honnold’s approach to fear is to use practice as a comfort and confidence builder.
7. Sink Into the Experience. On game day, his attitude is to release the anxiety and fear and immerse himself in goal attainment.

Interesting to note, Honnold’s brain, specifically his amygdala, functions differently and as a result he doesn’t experience fear as most of us do.

Now, here’s what I found on my route:

Preparing for exams? Try spaced learning as a method to increase retention.
Tarana Burke’s A Movement that Empowers
A new website illuminating the Heiltsuk Nation. Húy̓at: Our Voices, Our Land
Chicago hit 50 below and Candace Payne responded.
New voices at patients’ bedsides.
Wonder how a songbird learns?
UBC’s Celebrate Storytelling in Medicine event.
Age discrimination in the workforce.
Society of Teachers of Family Medicine (STFM) conference.
If you’re working on medically and scientifically validated technologies supporting mental health, emotional wellbeing, and human thriving, check this out.
Design abilities of problem solvers.
Tuition-free Stanford course: Partnering with the Public and Patients in Medical Research
Swearing reduces physical pain (I’m not condoning it).
How to change your mind.

We may see some sunshine on Sunday! Enjoy the mountains!

Onward and upward,

Jacqueline

Love this poster! For more information on how you can support your child’s mental health, visit Caring for Kids: Information for Parents from Canada’s Paediatricians.

For all you cardiology buffs! Shortly after Chopin’s death in 1849, his heart was pickled in a jar of cognac and smuggled by his sister past Russian guards and brought to Warsaw’s Holy Cross Church where it remains today. After 170 years, scientists have finally come to some agreement (or have they?) as to what took this young composer’s life. Read more on Frederic Chopin’s heart.

Canadian Association for Medical Education (CAME) Webinar Series (Feb 2019)
Diagnosing students/residents in difficulty and providing appropriate pedagogical interventions
Dr. Miriam Lacasse
Feb 12, 2019 | 1200-1300 PM
Diamond Health Care Centre, 4th Floor Room 4115 & UBC Campus, Life Sciences Centre, Room 1312CMR

Overview: Why do clinical teachers have such difficulty acknowledging that a student is in difficulty? One underlying reason is a lack of information about remediation options.

In this webinar, participants will use the analogy of a clinical reasoning process to analyze and take an organized approach to dealing with the daily problems facing learners in difficulty. They will learn how to recognize the signs and symptoms of students in difficulty, how to make a pedagogical diagnosis that takes into account the various dimensions of learning, and how to use a list of relevant pedagogical interventions generated by a BEME systematic review to help learners in difficulty advance in their learning (https://bemecollaboration.org/Reviews+In+Progress/Remediation+interventions/ ).

You can also attend from your office or home by completing the following simple steps:

1. Register at this link: https://events.eply.com/CAMEWebinar-2019-02-12
2. Once you’ve received your confirmation, send it along with a request to Faculty Development at: fac.dev@ubc.ca asking for a link to attend from your personal computer. You will need a webcam and microphone.

If you happen to be more centrally located, you or your site can request a link, particularly for Victoria, Prince George, Kelowna – please email Fac Dev at the address in step 2 to have your venue set up.

(Thank you Theresa!)

“If you try to distill a human being into a series of checkboxes, you don’t know the person, you know the checkboxes. So you don’t know what they’re missing on the spiritual or the social or the economic levels. All you know is the physical level — and people are way more than the total of a physical checklist. We need to actually understand mind, body and spirit to understand health, and that is the frightening part that we distill away when we try to make us all ones and zeroes and sets of numbers.”

More on “Platforming” healthcare: A conversation with Dr. Amy Compton-Phillips
Also, check out Matter’s community of innovators and disruptors in healthcare.
(Thank you Tim)