1) Please share your most interesting case with a patent (please ensure no specific patient info.)
Interesting is such a relative term in medicine! This is one of my most memorable cases.
Early in my career I was working in a remote community doing a clinic. I had a woman who was 34 weeks pregnant with twins, come in for a clinic visit because she was having “cramps”. Technically she was supposed to be going out of the community to deliver because we didn’t do high risk deliveries. However, when I did an assessment and exam, she was 4 cm dilated. At that point we didn’t know if it was Braxton hicks or active labour, but she became too high risk to transfer. I arranged for her to be moved to our closest hospital and went with her. The hospital was staffed with 10 Family doctors and a surgeon. Two doctors were out in the community doing clinic work and one was running Emergency. The patient went into labour and all of the other physicians were in the delivery room with her. We had two docs for the delivery, and two docs assigned for each baby once they were born. One of the babies did fine, one of the babies had to be resuscitated but eventually did ok, and once they were stabilized they got transferred out.
To me it was interesting from a logistical standpoint: “how do you do this” when you’re taking you’re entire medical staff to be involved in a case. It was an awesome outcome, and something we all still talk about when we get together.
2) What is the best advice you were given during your time in school that has had a lasting impact on your practice?
A lot of times patients and the media believe that its doctors that run the system, but when you’re on the ground doing the work, you know you cant get anything done without the rest of the team.
”Always remember the value of the team, don’t work as a silo”. Make sure your nurses, aids, cleaners, porters, RTs, and the rest of the support team feel like they are a part of the team and are involved. They need to know that they are as respected and as important as the physicians.
My most gracious and respected preceptors were the ones that practised this everyday, and made sure they worked as part of a team, they were not the one “in charge, being the boss”, I try to carry that forward everyday and make it part of my practise.
3) What are you doing currently/working on/interested in that is helping to impact our local medical community and/or local patients?
I’m still fairly new, having been here just over a year, but I recently agreed to take over the “M & M Rounds” for the Emergency Department. A lot of people think of M& M as “a time when somebody did something wrong” that we need to look at, but I see it as an opportunity to look at the entire system and see how we can improve things as a hospital or intra hospital transfers. We can implement change so that the next time something similar happens it can be safer for the patient.
That will be my project going forward, and I’m super excited about it, as at Ridge Meadows we have a very motivated group who want things to continually improve.
4) What is some advice or wisdom you would like to share with your medical staff peers, or any new physicians joining our community?
Often, we recognise how important our job is, but don’t acknowledge how stressful and draining it can be; we continue to push and push. I encourage everybody to find someone they can be real with, reach out to that person and ask them to check in every few months. It doesn’t have to be a long conversation; it doesn’t have to be a weekly conversation. But It needs to be somebody you know you can give real answers to.
If things start to get worse at work or you’re experiencing burnout, depression or harassment in the workplace, you have somebody you can be honest with. They can be a listening ear who will trigger you to find help or make changes once you have to give real answers.
I have a friend, we went through training parallel to each other, we don’t talk all the time, but every few months we check in with each other and ask those hard questions. I encourage everyone to find their person, and also be that person for somebody else.