Family Medicine Residency Site: Abbotsford-Mission

There’s a new tuition-free course with EdX on System Dynamics for Health Sciences:

“Effective and meaningful engagement with complex modern medical systems requires an overarching set of tools.

System dynamics is such a tool, allowing health practitioners to model and simulate problems ranging from the molecular level to the entire healthcare system and beyond. This introductory course will teach you the fundamental principles of system dynamics as you learn how to use system dynamics software to explore problems relevant to your field of health. Whether you work in molecular biology, clinical medicine, health policy, or any other health-related field, this course will equip you to investigate the effects of time delays, feedback and system structure. You will learn how to interpret the causes of typical system behaviors such as growth, decay and oscillation in terms of the underlying system properties, and to rapidly develop computer-based models and run simulations to gain insight into the problems in your domain.”

It begins today! Learn more and register here.

“The trouble is cardiologists will teach about stents and statins. They won’t teach you about sedentary lifestyles and about active transport and particulate pollution and all of these other things because they don’t know it themselves … if it was appearing in every single thing it wouldn’t take long before medical students are going ‘I seem to be hearing exactly the same thing in every subject – everything I’m hearing about the causes of cancer seems to be the same thing as causing lung disease which seems to be the same thing as causing coronary vascular disease and strokes – so why aren’t we doing something about that?”

~ An educator on teachers lack of knowledge on sustainable healthcare
….
As the international drive for healthcare professionals to embrace sustainability gains momentum, the UK has taken the lead. In the General Medical Council’s document Outcomes for graduates 2018(“Outcomes”), the medical regulator has placed a new obligation on medical education (General Medical Council 2018). Doctors qualifying or registering in the UK will be required to understand and apply the principles of sustainable healthcare to medical practice. Teaching this is the responsibility of medical schools and of doctors who are involved in medical education. Yet sustainability is an emerging concept to many in the medical profession, although the increasingly unsustainable nature of the healthcare system and potential ways to address this may already be familiar.”

More on Fulfilling a new obligation: Teaching and learning of sustainable healthcare in the medical education curriculum (2019) via Tun.

Download the Climate Change Toolkit for Healthcare Professionals here.

#SustainableHealthcare #MedicalEducation

“‘It’s a smell like I’ve never experienced, and I’ve been around a lot of different farms my entire life,’ said Gaudette. ‘At first, parents thought that it was rotting carcasses — that’s how putrid and horrible the smell was.’

She said people at the school have become nauseous, had headaches, and had respiratory issues due to the odour.

The company, 93 Land Company, declined an interview request from CBC News, but said in a statement it uses the property as a poultry farm and poultry litter storage facility.

Gaudette said it’s the manure that’s creating the foul smell — which she describes as ‘toxic’ — as it’s being stored under an open-air canopy that releases fumes.”

More on Foul odour returns to Abbotsford elementary school (2019) via CBC.

‘It’s a putrid, horrific smell’: Parents cry foul over odour at Abbotsford school (2018) via CBC.

More on farming and our environment:

Petition says pot-grow stench led to ‘Summer of Stink’ in Fraser Valley (2019) via The Abbotsford News.

Farm blamed for sickening stink repeatedly violated environmental orders (2018) via CBC Investigates.

#KnowWhereYourPatientsGoToSchool #AbbotsfordSchoolDistrict #KingTraditionalSchool

“SimWars, originally developed by the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM), is a clinical performance competition which specifically utilizes healthcare simulation technologies and processes to provide teams standardized opportunities to showcase their clinical abilities.
…
Twenty-two healthcare professionals are in position and at their stations and await the arrival of the competitors. This senior team includes doctors, advanced nurse practitioners, nurses, paramedics, over 20 volunteers and staff from four gracious sponsors. The first group of five students competing in SimWars await their instructions. Suddenly, a trainer appears and says: ‘Code Blue. Arrest team upstairs to Room One.’ The five students with various experience ranging from first year students to seniors, dressed in color-coded scrubs, race up the stairs to begin their first of three test scenarios.”

More on SimWars Medical Simulation Competition Expands Across Ireland via Healthy Simulation.

Interested UBC learners? I am! If you want to arrange something like this contact me at jacqueline.ashby@ubc.ca. Let’s see what we can do.

Warm regards,

Jacqueline

“Sounds and Science: Vienna Meets Vancouver” is part of the President’s Concert Series, to be held Nov. 30, 2019 on UBC campus. The event is modeled on a successful concert series launched in Austria in 2014, in cooperation with the Medical University of Vienna.

‘Basic research tends to always stay within its own box, yet research is telling the most beautiful stories,’ says Dr. Josef Penninger, director of UBC’s Life Sciences Institute, a professor of medical genetics and a Canada 150 Chair. ‘With this concert, we are bringing science out of the ivory tower, using the music of great composers such as Mozart, Schubert or Strauss to transport stories of discovery and insight into the major diseases that affected the composers themselves, and continue to have a significant impact on our society.'”

More on ‘Sounds and Science’ unites music with scientific research from Vienna to Vancouver via UBC Medicine.

“The findings, published today in CMAJ Open, suggest that young, low-income women may not be able to afford accessing the full range of contraceptives available in Canada. Improving access to affordable contraception may decrease the number of young women at risk of unintended pregnancy due to financial barriers, the researchers say.

‘We know that access to contraceptives is something that benefits public health by allowing people to plan pregnancies and plan their families according to their life circumstances,’ said Elizabeth Nethery, lead author of the study and a PhD student in the UBC faculty of medicine’s school of population and public health. ‘But our research shows that there may be cost barriers that could be potentially improved when it comes to contraceptive care in Canada.'”

More on Birth control options out of reach for many low-income women via UBC Medicine.

“In 1985, a report by the US Public Health Service Task Force on Women’s Health warned that ‘the historical lack of research focus on women’s health concerns has compromised the quality of health information available to women as well as the health care they receive’.

The campaign drew attention to some of the absurdities that resulted from this male bias, which Maya Dusenbery has summarised in her 2018 book Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed and Sick. She notes that, in the early 60s: ‘Observing that women tended to have lower rates of heart disease until their oestrogen levels dropped after menopause, researchers conducted the first trial to look at whether supplementation with the hormone was an effective preventive treatment. The study enrolled 8,341 men and no women … And a National Institutes of Health-supported pilot study from Rockefeller University that looked at how obesity affected breast and uterine cancer didn’t enrol a single woman.’

And that’s not all.”

More on The female problem: how male bias in medical trials ruined women’s health via The Guardian.

“We’ve been relying on those same runs of fish, those wild fish, since the beginning of time. When your health is their health, you’re married in that way. And I think that union creates the sacredness. To have that relationship with a single species is real special.

…If we let those runs go, then they are gone, and I do not think that we as people who are on this planet now should be okay with allowing salmon to go extinct on our watch.”

~ Amy Cordalis, Yurok Tribal Attorney

#SaveBCWildSalmon #RemoveTheFishFarmsFromClayoquotSound #OurHealthIsConnected

More on Conservation groups sound alarm over another sea lice outbreak in Clayoquot Sound via CBC.

More on Fish farm caused Atlantic salmon spill near San Juans, then tried to hide how bad it was, state says via Seattle Times.

A great educational resource for musculoskeletal clinical skills! Check out their videos and articles here.