On Aug. 7, 2018, millwright Shawn Fitzpatrick was riding his motorcycle from his Ajax home to the plant in Scarborough where he worked. At 4:40 a.m., the 54-year-old was struck at an intersection by a left-turning transport truck.

A prosthetic socket is 3D printed in the lab at St. John’s Rehab at Sunnybrook (Photography by Doug Nicholson)

“I could feel it hitting my ribs, and my face was stuck on the front headlight,” Shawn recalls. “I tried to get my motorcycle out of there, but with the impact, it must have stalled. Then I woke up with somebody holding my head.” 

Shawn was taken to the Tory Regional Trauma Centre at Sunnybrook with life-threatening injuries. 

He has almost no memory of the next few days. Later, Shawn learned that physicians had removed his damaged spleen, repaired his broken left hip, knee and lower leg bones and grafted skin onto places where he no longer had any. But the biggest concern was Shawn’s severely injured left foot.

“They kept on trying to save it, but finally they said, ‘Your foot’s started to turn black and your pulse there is really bad,’” he says.

Faced with the prospect of amputation, Shawn thought about all the things he still wanted to do with his life: playing with his grandchildren, spending time every year with his mother in their native Newfoundland, being in the outdoors and staying active. He chose to see the positive in the situation.

“I was happy getting my leg cut off because the prostheses today are amazing,” Shawn says. “I knew it was going to put me in a better spot.”

The amputation, about 20 centimetres below the knee, took place just over a month after the crash. Afterwards, Shawn began rehabilitation therapy at Sunnybrook’s St. John’s Rehab, where he stayed until going home in November. 

Joining a 3D printer study

Shawn currently returns to St. John’s Rehab twice a week to attend physiotherapy. He’s also part of a study there looking at the potential benefits of using  3D printing technology versus traditional methods to make a socket – the part of a prosthesis that connects to the residual limb.

The research is being led by Dr. Amanda Mayo, a physiatrist (physician focusing on physical medicine and rehab) at St. John’s Rehab who specializes in working with patients with limb loss. She is collaborating with the team of prosthetists at the Sunnybrook Centre for Independent Living (SCIL). Another study partner is Nia Technologies, a non-profit organization affiliated with the University of Toronto.

With a grant from MaRS, a Toronto innovation hub, the researchers are exploring whether a 3D printing system is faster, more cost-effective and more comfortable for patients than the traditional method of making sockets using plaster casting. 

They have produced “diagnostic” sockets using the innovative technique for five patients, to determine the quality of the fit. They hope to enroll another 15 patients in the study before the end of 2019. All patients, like Shawn, have below-the-knee amputations and are trying out these sockets during their therapy sessions at St. John’s Rehab. 

Like the ‘foundation  of a house’

The socket is the only part of a prosthesis that is custom-made for the patient and its fit is critical, says Shane Glasford, team lead in prosthetics at SCIL.

“I equate it to the foundation of a house. The other [prosthesis] components are built on top of that good-fitting socket,” says Glasford. “The socket has to be comfortable enough to walk on, to give enough support for the user and to hold their body weight, allowing them to do all the things they want to do.”

In the first year or two after limb loss, the shape of a patient’s residual limb changes rapidly, and the patient may go through several sockets. The 3D method may allow the prosthetist greater adaptability and versatility in the fabrication process to create better-fitting sockets.

Patient-focused research

While research into computer-aided socket design and 3D production is taking place elsewhere, few studies are looking at the potential cost savings, turn-around time and quality improvement aspects of 3D printing, Dr. Mayo says.

“We’re doing qualitative interviews to see how patients like the digital scanning process and 3D printed sockets,” she adds. “In keeping with our St. John’s Rehab research mandate, this is research focused on improving patient-centred prosthetic care.” 

Dr. Mayo notes that conventional socket-making has some challenges. In this process, prosthetists first take a cast of the residual limb. The cast is then filled with plaster to create a positive mold. Once dry, the mold is contoured by hand. Finally, thermodynamic plastic is draped over the mold to create the prosthetic socket.

It takes about eight hours of manual labour to make a socket in this way. However, because of the time required for the plaster to dry and the need to chip out the plaster inside the socket, the turnaround for a patient staying in rehab is about seven days.

Dr. Mayo says that the initial step of making the mold also requires prosthetists to physically touch patients, which can be uncomfortable if they have skin wounds or skin grafts. 

With digital scans and 3D printing, there is no need to touch the patient. The process involves a 10-to-15-minute scan using a tablet for “shape capture,” after which a trained prosthetist fine tunes the shape on a computer. The image is then transmitted to a 3D printer to produce the socket out of plastic, though the prosthetist then needs to “smooth out” its edges, Glasford says.

Studying the benefits

The team is still assessing the time and cost savings with the new method. According to Glasford, it currently takes six hours to 3D print a diagnostic socket.

“Cost-accessible 3D printers, such as the one we are using, [have shown they are] suitable for making temporary sockets for diagnostic purposes to verify fit,” Glasford says. He adds that the digital process will also become swifter as prosthetists at Sunnybrook get more comfortable with the new technology. 

The post Could 3D printing make prosthetics quicker and more comfortable for patients? appeared first on Your Health Matters.

At 1:27 pm, a man drove a white rental van onto the sidewalk near the intersection of Yonge and Finch streets, deliberately hitting pedestrians. Ten people died and 15 were injured.

At 1:48 p.m., Sunnybrook issued a Code Orange, warning staff that victims of a mass casualty were on the way. Ten of the injured were taken to Sunnybrook’s campus on Bayview Avenue – less than 10 kilometres from the scene of the tragedy.

The victims started arriving seven minutes after the Code Orange was called, at 2:06 p.m. Here is how several Sunnybrook employees recall what happened on that day.

Miranda Lamb

Miranda been a nurse at Sunnybrook since 2005. She was the nurse in charge of the Emergency Department on the day of the van attack.

Has been a nurse at Sunnybrook since 2005. She was the nurse in charge of the Emergency Department on the day of the van attack.

I had agreed to trade a shift with a colleague that day, so I was in the Emergency Department (ED), in charge.

When the patients arrived they were all triaged, assessed by the trauma team and emergency staff and cared for in the ED or sent to the operating room or the intensive care unit.

You very quickly realize in a Code Orange that you cannot do everything yourself; you have to work as a team across all disciplines and departments. In the ED, we are the first ones who see patients coming into the hospital, but we had staff come from all over the hospital offering their help. Everybody had to stretch beyond their usual capacity. It was just remarkable in that way. We had one goal: to receive, stabilize and provide care for each patient – no matter what they needed.

I’ve always said that working in the ED is unique, and we sometimes see the people we work with more than our own families. So you need to be able to rely on each other to get through tough situations.

You also need to rely on your team after an event like this, to make sure that everybody is okay and feels supported. It was only after we cared for all of the patients that we could begin to appreciate the full extent of what had happened on Yonge Street, and what the impact would be for the families and patients.

We too were experiencing this event as mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, Torontonians and caregivers. We all went in to do a job that day, but we’re all human.

Val Soper

Val has been a social worker in Sunnybrook’s Emergency Department since 2003.

I was in the Emergency Department (ED) when the Code Orange was called.

My social work colleagues from across the hospital were in contact with me immediately by phone, text and in-person to see how they could help. Along with emergency preparedness leaders, a decision was made to set up our Family Information and Support Centre quickly in the hospital’s auditorium. We knew family members and loved ones would be on their way soon.

The support centre was staffed by Social Work, Spiritual Care and Volunteer Resources. On that particular day, we also had other disciplines offering to help. Psychiatry was there, a music therapist, an occupational therapist, a geriatric nurse and others.

I spent most of my time in the ED and in communication with support centre staff once the centre was set up. The first thing I did was station two staff members at the ED entrance, as well as the hospital’s main door, to direct arriving family and friends to the support centre to start the process of locating their loved ones.

In the early evening, I moved from the ED to the support centre. At that time, many of the families had been registered, “matched” and reconnected with their loved ones, who were being treated in hospital, in intensive care or in surgery. At the end of the night, my job was to support those families who were still waiting for news. The last family was there until 2 a.m.

The Sunnybrook response was incredibly united. We all pulled together and worked as a team. Our emergency preparedness – all those Family Information and Support Centre meetings and mock exercises – helped on this very difficult day.

Dr. Fred Brenneman

Dr. Brenneman is a trauma surgeon at Sunnybrook, where he’s worked for the past 23 years. He previously served as a medical director of the trauma program.

People were extremely keen to offer help and provide whatever they could regardless of what they were doing at the time, whether or not they were on call.

It happened at a time when the hospital was full with high bed occupancies. To the credit of those who manage beds and to the surrounding GTA hospitals that pitched in and offered to take some of our stable inpatients, we cleared enough Intensive Care Unit (ICU) beds and operating rooms to manage the surge.

We normally have one trauma team working per day, but with the Code Orange call, we very quickly had three teams assembled in the trauma bay looking after the patients.

I supervised the management of one patient until they were off to get a CT scan. Then,

I took another patient up to the operating room because I was the surgeon on call that day. By the time that operation was finished, our patients had their destinations allocated. Some of them were already in the operating room, some of them were in the angiography suite for imaging and treatment, and some were already in the ICU – so the process to treat everyone’s injuries happened pretty quickly. If you do what you need to do and trust your expertise and your training, then there’s no panic. I am very proud of the Sunnybrook team’s response.

Johnny Amatuzio

Johnny is the supervisor of security services at Sunnybrook, where he’s worked for a decade.

Because it was publicly broadcast that most of the injured were coming to Sunnybrook, we decided – for safety – to go on lockdown. What that does is restrict access to the Emergency Department (ED).

Our Security staff set up for crowd control. We made sure that the roadway to the ED was clear for multiple ambulances. When patients started arriving, we escorted the stretchers to the trauma bay.

My manager and I called everyone in our department. Several people came in early for their shifts and others came in on their day off.

Everyone in the hospital came together to make sure everything could be done to the best of our ability for all the patients and their families. My heart goes out to all those whose lives were changed by this tragedy.

Vanessa Flores

Vanessa is a respiratory therapist at Sunnybrook in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU).

The hospital team leaders started to gather the doctors in the Emergency Department (ED) to brief them about the Code Orange situation.

They said a van had hit multiple pedestrians and there were many patients who needed critical care. I immediately called our department and spoke with a senior staff member and said we needed all of the transport ventilators brought downstairs to the ED.

I headed upstairs to help grab equipment and by the time I made it back downstairs, there were already patients coming into the trauma bay. I moved to a bedside – making sure anaesthesia was there, preparing my monitors and coming up with a game plan with the team.

We called in extra staff and thankfully three extra respiratory therapists came in.

A critically injured patient arrived requiring stabilization and admission to the intensive care unit. I was with that patient for two-and-a-half hours.

Everybody stepped into their role and focused on what they would normally do, but as if in fast-forward. I was thinking, ‘how can I get this patient stable, move them to a scanner and get them a bed?’

Eventually, once all of the initial activity was over, we had an opportunity to sit and kind of calm down because when you’re working with your patient, you’re so focused that you can lose track of time.

We had multiple debriefs afterwards. At the debrief for the respiratory therapists, hospital leadership said, “We’re here to listen to you. What would you like to talk to us about?” It was a very open and safe discussion. We felt we could just be very truthful about how we were feeling without judgment, which was fantastic.

Dr. Oskar Singer

Dr. Singer has been an anesthetist at Sunnybrook for five years.

On a normal day, we have one anesthetist who’s the main operating room co-ordinator. Anesthetists carry phones and relay with the nursing team and the surgical team, making plans for the day. They determine which emergency case should go into the operating room next.

My colleague, Dr. Paul McHardy, was in that role when the Code Orange was called, so I was able to help coordinate trauma patients downstairs in the trauma bay.

I grabbed a phone and ran downstairs. As each patient was triaged, assessed and a plan was made, I’d immediately call Dr. McHardy and give him a perspective on what the patient needed. From the moment that patients started coming in, the atmosphere was intense but controlled.

Patients who were coming in after the trauma bay was full were triaged to available Emergency Department (ED) beds. Porters moved patients in the ED who were doing well enough to make space for new, more seriously injured patients.

We sent patients with life-threatening injuries immediately to the operating room. Others were stabilized and sent with teams to CT scanners to determine what kind of internal injuries had occurred.

This was definitely the most significant, large-scale incident that I’ve been part of. I think one of the interesting things that happens is you automatically fall back on your training.

Above all else, you’re doing everything for the patient before you focus on how you actually feel. For me, that happened when I got home that night and had some time to reflect on the gravity of what we’d just gone through, the number of lives that were affected and the permanent changes that happened to so many families.

A few things stand out about that day, including how well everyone interacted and came together at such a dire time. One example is how quickly the Environmental Services staff were able to turn over the trauma bays in between patients to ensure the most efficient care.

The other was how quiet the trauma bays were; obviously there was the noise of action and people communicating with each other, but it wasn’t as chaotic as you’d think it would be. Everyone was ready to go.

Adonis Lopez

Adonis worked as a patient service partner at Sunnybrook, providing personal support services to patients and their health-care teams for 14 years.

The Code Orange was called one hour into my shift. One of my first tasks was to deliver stretchers and wheelchairs to the Emergency Department.

After that, I was asked to help set up the Family Information Support Centre in the auditorium, a place where family and loved ones could gather to receive news and emotional support. We couldn’t really anticipate how many people were coming, so we set up as many private areas as we could with the equipment we had. We thought of other things we would need, like water, hand sanitizer, pens, tissue boxes, and then we’d go out and get them.

Then I was stationed at one of the hospital’s entrances, so when families arrived we could walk them to the Support Centre.

The Emergency Department was in lockdown, so families entered through the other hospital entrances. I approached those who looked lost or concerned and asked if they needed help.

I’ve worked in the Critical Care Unit and in Same Day Surgery, and I understand that Sunnybrook is a trauma centre, but I didn’t actually realize how serious the incident was until afterwards, when we had our debrief meetings. That’s when it hit me. I hope that the little things I did helped and that a lot of the little things other people did helped, too.

Dr. Dan Cass

Dr. Cass is the executive vice-president and chief medical executive of Sunnybrook.

I don’t think there was anyone at Sunnybrook who wasn’t in some way part of the Code Orange response.

The obvious ones were the staff in the Emergency Department – the trauma team leaders, nurses and respiratory therapists – as well as those in the Critical Care units, the operating rooms and Medical Imaging. But as soon as this happened, all of the teams from the medicine units began going down to the Emergency Department and bringing admitted patients up to the wards. Even if teams weren’t part of the direct response to the Code Orange, they were part of making room for someone else.

It’s also important to recognize the group that set up and staffed the Family Information Support Centre (FISC) to support families, gather information and help connect victims from the incident with family members and loved ones.

I think all of us in Toronto were affected. This was an event that happened in our home, and it’s an emotionally jarring thing for anyone to have to come to terms with, let alone being personally involved.

Aileen Ho

Aileen is a physiotherapist in the burns and trauma unit at St. John’s Rehab, which has been part of Sunnybrook since 2012.

I’ve often said that I live in a small bubble of only a one-kilometre radius. I live about a block from Yonge and Finch. I went to school in this area. lean walk to work, bike to work – I’m that close.

My three-year-old daughter’s daycare is pretty close to Yonge and Finch. That day, I was really concerned about her because the kids go out for walks in the neighbourhood a lot. Was she safe, did they go into lockdown? I worried she might have seen something, but luckily, she didn’t.

I had just come back from maternity leave [Ho also has a one-year-old daughter] on the day of the incident. News was spreading about a big, multiple fatality happening really close to us. (St. John’s Rehab is located less than two kilometers from the scene.)

Many of us who work at St. John’s Rehab were thinking that a lot of the victims would have gone to Sunnybrook due to the proximity of the incident and that, eventually, we would be seeing them in our unit. In preparation, we had team meetings to discuss how to best prepare for caring for these patients.

They started coming in to St. John’s Rehab soon after and our team went to work.

So often, it’s when they’re in physiotherapy that trauma patients really open up. We’re constants in their lives when they’re in rehab because we see them every day and a strong rapport is built. I think a lot of us love our jobs because of those relationships and the difference we make in our patients’ lives.

I’m always excited when someone takes their first step because sometimes it can take months to get to that point after an injury. Even just little changes – like when they no longer have a cast or splint, or being able to put a little weight on their legs – it’s a big celebration. Every little change is a big change.

Just sharing the joy with them is wonderful. That’s what you come to work for every day.

Photography by Kevin Van Paassen

Our thoughts — and our hearts — continue to be with the victims and families of the Toronto van attack and Danforth shooting.  

The post Health-care providers recall their experiences working the April 23 Code Orange appeared first on Your Health Matters.

Nancy McClure, a customer care co-ordinator with Metrolinx, is tightening a tourniquet around the white-shirted arm of her colleague Gobi Ravinthiran, who holds the same position with the Greater Toronto Area/Hamilton public-transit agency. Amid laughter, she asks him three times if it hurts – it does, as it’s supposed to – and then tries to distract him by saying, “Look at your bicep!”

Nancy is practising a technique she has just learned in Stop the Bleed, a two-hour course offered at Sunnybrook to teach first responders and people who work in large public spaces, as well as the general public, to deal with uncontrolled bleeding, which is one of the most preventable causes of death from trauma outside the hospital setting.

She was among 100 Metrolinx employees taking the morning session; another 60 attended in the afternoon. “We see all kinds of things at Union Station,” says Nancy, 30, of the workplace she and Gobi share. “It makes a big difference if you’ve been prepared and you know what to do.”

Stop the Bleed started in the U.S. in the wake of the shooting in 2012 at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., when 20 students, aged 6 and 7, and six adult staff were killed. That tragedy led to the Hartford Consensus, a strategy created by health-care and government leaders who met in Newtown and which recommended, among other things, that more people should learn how to treat uncontrolled bleeding.

When Dr. Avery Nathens, Sunnybrook’s surgeon-in-chief, heard about Stop the Bleed, he committed himself to bringing it to Canada. He found a ready partner in Sharon Ramagnano, manager of trauma services at Sunnybrook. In May, the two travelled to Chicago to learn more about the program from the American College of Surgeons, for which Dr. Nathens is the director of the Trauma Quality Improvement Program (TQIP).

Soon after, they taught 12 Sunnybrook staff members to be Stop the Bleed instructors; there are now 26 instructors among Sunnybrook staff. So far, besides Metrolinx, the course has been presented to about a dozen City of Toronto events staff in the lead-up to Nuit Blanche, the city’s annual arts celebration in the fall.

“I thought ultimately this was a necessary thing to bring to Canadians,” says Dr. Nathens, who is also a senior scientist of Sunnybrook Research Institute’s evaluative clinical sciences platform and its Trauma, Emergency & Critical Care (TECC) research program. “We’ve been relatively immune thus far from mass shooting events, but likely this is going to come to us at some point. And the skills that can be acquired through the bleeding control course are not necessarily just specific to gunshot wounds. It might be a motor-vehicle crash, it might be a bike accident.” Dr. Nathens also points out that without proper intervention, people can “bleed out in minutes,” dying well before the arrival of Emergency Medical Services (EMS).

There are similarities between the program and CPR training, according to Dr. Nathens and Sharon. “Our thought was, [controlling bleeding] is just as simple; however, it’s not recognized as the first thing for people to do,” says Sharon. The course teaches participants how, after calling 911, they can stop uncontrolled bleeding – in a limb by using a tourniquet, and in a limb or the trunk of the body by packing wounds with gauze or another material and then applying pressure until help arrives. One hour of the Stop the Bleed program is devoted to hands-on practice involving a partner and then a fake limb.

Trainees are taught not to focus on possibly introducing bacteria into someone’s wound when applying pressure or packing. Instead the focus should be on the life-saving technique they are doing to help them make it to a trauma centre where the medical professionals can fix their injuries and any complications.

When Toronto hosted the Trauma Association of Canada’s annual meeting in February this year, Sunnybrook taught health-care practitioners from across the country how to be instructors for Stop the Bleed. Sharon also coordinated efforts for training to be offered in the GTA by contacting malls and other public places where masses of people typically gather.

Upon learning about Stop the Bleed, Steve Harvey – manager of operational support for Metrolinx’s safety and security division – quickly arranged for Metrolinx employees to attend the program. “Things can happen that create trauma for people, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be a terrorist act,” says Steve. “It could simply be a massive motor-vehicle collision. And don’t forget that downtown, there’s a significant amount of construction going on. If we have people available on the ground who have skills to help people survive, to me that’s a win.”

Sharon Ramagnano, manager of trauma services at Sunnybrook, and Dr. Avery Nathens, surgeon-in-chief, train hospital staff to become Stop the Bleed instructors for the larger community.

The post Sunnybrook brings life-saving skills to first responders and the public appeared first on Your Health Matters.

As a family doctor who works in Northern Ontario communities, Britt Lehmann-Bender is sometimes the only doctor handling what she calls “big and scary” situations: treating victims of snowmobile, ATV or motor vehicle accidents. So the 32-year-old jumped at the chance to take further training to help give her trauma patients the best possible care. Last fall, she took part in Ontario’s innovative Supplementary Emergency Medicine Experience choosing as her elective a two-week trauma rotation at Sunnybrook.

The program, which began as a pilot project in 2013 and has been running every spring and fall since September 2015, offers paid fellowships to family physicians practising in smaller or rural communities who want to build up their emergency-medicine skill set.

Participants spend three months in Toronto, completing two four-week placements in the emergency departments of Greater Toronto Area hospitals, with one day every week devoted to advancing their skills in classrooms and simulation labs. They get an additional month for clinical study, which they can spend either working in intensive care or in a two-week trauma rotation at either Sunnybook or St. Michael’s Hospital, usually complemented by two weeks of anaesthesia training. The program is funded by the University of Toronto’s Department of Family and Community Medicine and the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care.

For Dr. Lehmann-Bender, who has spent one week a month working in remote Northern Ontario communities – including Neskantanga First Nation on Attawapiskat Lake – the rotation at Sunnybrook’s Tory Regional Trauma Centre was invaluable. She got to work with some of the country’s top trauma physicians at Ontario’s leading centre for the treatment of the province’s most critically injured patients. Given that Sunnybrook gets three to four new trauma cases daily, she was able to treat patients in much worse shape than any she’d seen before. She carried out procedures that were new to her, such as putting in an arterial line (for monitoring blood pressure continuously and extracting blood samples).

“It’s been easy for me to go back [to my practice] and, when I have to manage traumas, to think of the multitude of experiences with various traumas I had at Sunnybrook,” Dr. Lehmann- Bender says. “You’re not having a stress response because you’ve done something a few times and you’re comfortable managing similar things. It has helped me be calm.”

Dr. Avery Nathens, Sunnybrook’s surgeon-in-chief and trauma medical director, says the hospital’s trauma elective helps to fill the experience gap for physicians outside of big cities, who might see just a single critically injured patient every year.

In addition to developing their technical expertise, it enhances their confidence.

“If you’ve never taken care of a patient like this, it’s easy to become overwhelmed, and the most important thing is to keep your wits about you, so you can focus on the priorities. And having done this on a rotation five or six times a day, they get pretty confident at being able to focus on the patient’s needs and move the care plan forward.”

Sunnybrook is an ideal place for learning about treatment of critically injured patients. “We have extremely high trauma volumes and are the largest trauma centre in Canada,” says Dr. Nathens, who holds the De Souza Chair in trauma research. “We probably see about 1,300 severely injured patients a year. Patients come to us with a variety of different problems. Our location in the city means we encounter victims of high-speed crashes or interpersonal violence, which challenge providers in different ways.”

Dr. Homer Tien, a Sunnybrook trauma surgeon who helped to create the trauma rotation for the program, notes that participants work on procedures in a simulation lab but also get a lot of hands-on clinical experience. “They also shadow one of the established trauma team leaders, and they can watch how he or she runs the case and then slowly take over. And there’s a comfort level in knowing that you have the backup of someone more experienced to help you in case you run into a difficult situation.”

In addition, says Dr. Nathens, there are lessons to be learned from reviewing patient care. “Every morning, we have what we call ‘morning report,’ where we review each patient in detail and review care plans. It also provides a great opportunity for teaching to build on the experiential learning that takes place in the trauma bay.”

Trauma surgeon Dr. Homer Tien discusses a trauma patient’s medical imaging with his team. (Photograph by Doug Nicholson)

COMBAT MEDICINE

Military doctors gain confidence through Sunnybrook’s trauma education

Dr. Rob Riddell, a military physician with the rank of Major with Special Operations Forces in the Canadian military, says his trauma rotations at Sunnybrook proved to be tremendously beneficial during a recent deployment overseas.

“I was able to apply all of the skills that I learned at Sunnybrook to severely injured battlefield trauma patients, a significant amount of patients with penetrating injuries, blunt trauma, head injuries and everything in between. I’d say my decision making is much, much more enhanced than it ever would have been had I not gone to Sunnybrook.”

Sunnybrook began offering trauma rotations to Canadian Forces physicians in 2012. These sessions – a six-week turn for medical residents and a two-week refresher for physicians about to deploy or in high-readiness units – were launched by Sunnybrook trauma surgeon Dr. Homer Tien, a former senior trauma physician in the Canadian military who spent almost a year in Afghanistan.

“These doctors need to be able to manage major trauma cases and to maintain this clinical readiness throughout their military career,” says Dr. Tien, who holds the rank of Colonel. “Sunnybrook’s Tory Regional Trauma Centre helps them do this.”

For Dr. Riddell – who was among the 17 candidates in contention to become Canadian Space Agency astronauts – his comfort level and confidence in managing severely injured people have “gone up tenfold. It’s freed up breathing space, which was sometimes taken up too much by stress and allows me to think a little more clearly.”

The post Sunnybrook’s trauma training helps rural & military doctors enhance skills & confidence appeared first on Your Health Matters.