Family Medicine Residency Site: Abbotsford-Mission

Course Description: This is a highly interactive course on common and new therapeutic issues from an evidence based perspective. The scope of information is broad, practical and often controversial, appealing to physicians, nurse practitioners and pharmacists.

This Group Learning program has been certified by the College of Family Physicians of Canada and the British Columbia Chapter for up to 12 Mainpro+ credits.

Learn more or register here!

“Patients in hospital need to eat nutritious food to heal. Yet research suggests that 51 per cent of young children admitted to hospital in one study lost weight, as did nearly 45 per cent of adult patients. Some are too sick to eat. Many others leave the food tray untouched, leading to about 1.3 kilograms of food per bed to be thrown out each day. By one Canadian estimate, about half of the food placed at patients’ bedsides went to waste.”

More on How Bringing Room Service to Hospitals Can Help Patients Heal (via CBC Podcast)

UBC’s Preceptor Role Description is available! Download here.

Hat tip to brain scientist and fellow mountain climber, Dr. Todd Maddox, for his fantastic article on the learning science of expertise. Thank you Todd for sharing your work and brilliance! More here on Building Healthcare Expertise with Virtual Reality.

Hot off the press! The digital transformation of physician-patient consultations: Identifying problems and approaches to improve adherence (Thanks Bonnie!)

Great piece out of the New Yorker. The personal toll of whistle blowing: Why one physician took the risk of becoming an F.B.I. informant to expose alleged Medicare fraud by Sheelah Kolhatkar.

The models and access atlas to primary care: British Columbia.

Territories by Land. What a beautiful map!

Ten things to never apologize for again.

Neurotech startups to watch.

Diagnosing diseases by smell: Artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and molecular technology intersect. NaNose!

Physician health: A review of lifestyle behaviours and preventative health care among physicians by Katie Wiskar.

The supply of physicians in Canada: Projections and assessment (via Fraser Institute)

How to better care for seniors living with HIV (via The Star Vancouver)

Bill of the month! Amazing to learn what an allergy test can cost in the US (via NPR)

The science of stress and how our emotions affect our susceptibility to burnout and disease (via Brainpickings)

Snow is forecasted this Sunday so please drive safe and be prepared for slippery conditions.

Have a great weekend!

Jacqueline

Good news! As of 2019, the AMEE CPD Webinar Series will be entirely free!

Next session is on “Physician assessment: What strategies do physicians use to assess themselves? How effective are these strategies in facilitating change?”

Facilitator: Jocelyn Lockyer, Cumming School of Medicine
Date: Monday, February 4, 2019
Time: 6:00 a.m. Pacific Time
Register here.

This webinar will review the research and theory related to self-assessment, the assessment methods that physicians use, the outcomes physicians typically achieve, and propose approaches that may increase the outcomes from assessment activities. Participants will describe how they have increased the viability and uptake of assessment data.

A big thank you to the staff and residents of Maplewood Care Society including CEO Heidi Mannis, Resident Director Krista Homfeld, and Board President Ann Douglas for taking the time and energy to explain the role and responsibilities of long-term care environments. We also learned about the innovation and creativity that’s necessary in these settings in order to accommodate families and support residents’ quality of life.

Anne was kind enough to forward us a series of resources that you may find useful:

• BC’s Long-Term Resident Care.
• Fraser Health Residential Care. If you’re searching for a residential care location, click here.
• Interior Health Long-Term Care.
• Island Health Home Care, Assisted Living, and Residential Care.
• Northern Health Long-Term Care Homes.
• Vancouver Coastal Health Residential Care.

As part of our ongoing Design Thinking curriculum, our learning objectives for this session and field trip include understanding how to:

• FM Expert: Provide continuity of care to a patient population through coordination, advocacy and interdisciplinary collaboration in a variety of settings.
• Collaborator: Apply strategies to integrate and engage health care profession colleagues in respectful shared decision-making.
• Communicator: Actively elicit and synthesize information from and perspectives of patients and families, colleagues and other professionals.
• Manager: Integrate community resources to support continuity of patient care including other health professionals, community agencies and groups either within the community or on referral out of the community.
• Health Advocate: Identify barriers to improved health, and accessing resources in the community, and work to ameliorate these barriers.

I know that several of you expressed suggestions to Ann about how long-term care may be improved. We encourage you to continue sharing these ideas and recommendations with us.

Thank you again to all those that participated!

Warm regards,

Jacqueline

“Consider that we don’t have a clear national picture of the vaccination rate in particular towns and cities. We don’t know the Canadian marriage or divorce rate. We don’t know how much drug makers pay the Canadian doctors who are charged with prescribing their products. We don’t have detailed data on the level of lead in Canadian children’s blood. We don’t know the rate at which Canadian workers get injured. We don’t know the number of people who are evicted from their homes. We don’t even know how far Canadians drive – a seeming bit of trivia that can tell us about an economy’s animal spirits, as well as the bite that green policies are having.

Our ignorance is decades in the making, with causes that cut to the heart of Canada’s identity as a country: provincial responsibility for health and education that keeps important information stuck in silos and provides little incentive for provinces to keep easily comparable numbers about themselves; a zeal for protecting personal privacy on the part of our statistical authorities that shades into paranoia; a level of complacency about the scale of our problems that keeps us from demanding transparency and action from government; and a squeamishness about race and class that prevents us from finding out all we could about disparities between the privileged and the poor.”

Eric Andrew Gee and Tavia Grant on In the dark: The cost of Canada’s data deficit via The Globe and Mail

Contact the Chief Statistician of Canada if you have any ideas or suggestions on improving StatCan’s data collection, transparency, and reporting.

“The most powerful path to being sustainable as a healthcare institution isn’t through turning off the lights or unplugging electronics – it’s in changing the way that patients eat.”

(in Transforming the Hospital Meal for Sustainability via Nourish)

Interesting discussions are taking place this week regarding Canada’s Food Guide. I hope that these conversations and changes spark further thought, innovation, and creativity around providing healthier food options in our educational institutions and hospitals. As an idea, ARHCC may want to consider partnering with UFV’s Culinary Arts to design a socially and ecologically responsible food services program that offers patrons a locally-produced, plant-based menu. The collaboration between Abbotsford’s hospital and university could result in a very fruitful relationship that benefits the health and wellness of our community!

Here are a few other items on the plate:

Wilderness Medicine Elective for Resident Physicians via McGill.

FemInEM Idea Exchange 2019.

HIV exhibit highlights Vancouver’s role in activism.

Two more Japanese medical schools admit discriminating against women via AMEE.

The Creative License. (Thank you Ann)

Anatomy, technology, art, and culture: Toward a realistic perspective of the brain.

Training Family Physicians as researchers.

First accredited continuing medical education course filmed in VR via AMEE.

A second life for chopsticks.

Commonwealth Club podcast. (Thank you Dr. Westgeest)

Health researchers using social media (take the survey).

VR in healthcare is changing the game.

Have a great weekend! And good luck to all at CaRMS!

Warm regards,

Jacqueline

Canada’s Food Guide is now available online. The site provides consumers with educational resources as well as healthy eating habits, tips, and recipes. Policy makers and health professionals may review the updated guidelines here.

After Timothy Aungst, PharmD read Kini & Ho’s (2018) “Interventions to Improve Medication Adherence: A Review” he designed the tracking pathway above to illustrate the process and place where digital health technologies may play a meaningful role in tracking medication adherence:

“The key thing I am pointing out here is tracking and not modifying adherence. I do not think we are there where technology alone can be a digital therapeutic (maybe with time though) that can change adherence alone. Rather, I support the use of digital technologies as an adjunct tool to track actionable data to be utilized by a health team to intervene on medication adherence with objective data points.”
Timothy Aungst on How to Track Medication Adherence with Digital Health Technologies

#MadeMeThink #DigitalHealthTech #Innovation #DigitalMedicine

Starting off our new year, I want to connect with you and learn how your journey is progressing. As your Program Coach, one of my objectives is to meet with Preceptors and Residents to discuss your goals and ideas as well as provide you with the educational resources you need for success. We’ve also got a few events in the works that I’d like to gather your thoughts on. I’ll be reaching out via email to schedule you in! Coffee is my treat!

Warm regards,

Jacqueline