Shared on behalf of Andrea Raynak, Director, Nursing Practice
I am pleased to announce that Jennifer Gadioma has accepted the position of Interprofessional Educator.
Jennifer has been working as a Respiratory Therapist for the last eight years at the Hospital, applying in-depth knowledge of principles, methods and procedures for the diagnosis and treatment of respiratory diseases. Jennifer has worked in all care settings, with a specialized focus in the Intensive Care Unit, Neonatal Intensive Care units and the Emergency Department. Furthermore, Jennifer is a Neonatal Resuscitation Instructor, Neonatal and Infant Transport Team Champion, a Rural Trauma Team Development Course Instructor and the Canadore College Respiratory Therapy Program Advisory Committee Chair.
Jennifer has a special interest and passion for education and is actively involved with the Northern Ontario School of Medicine and the Hospital’s Regional Critical Care Response team where she educates nurses and physicians about emergency airway equipment, management and mechanical ventilation strategies.
The aforementioned experiences will provide a great foundation for Jennifer’s success in the Interprofessional Educator role beginning October 9, 2023.
Lastly, in her free time she is a proud aunt, enjoys tractor pulling, camping, fishing and traveling with her husband.
National Health Care Supply Chain Week (October 1-7), is an opportunity to recognize the importance of the health care supply chain professionals and honour them for their exceptional contributions to patient care and the innovative ways in which they support their health care organizations and communities.
The theme this year, “The Power of Partnerships”, celebrates the central role of health care supply chain professionals in supporting their organizations through incredible collaboration and maximizing resources by forming strategic alliances – the true embodiment of advancing health care through supply chain excellence.
Supply chain professionals ensure operational performance by collaborating and innovating with other professionals both internally and externally. During the past year, our Hospital’s Purchasing and Stores departments have amalgamated to create synergies and deliver strategic value to the organization. Please join us in thanking supply chain and procurement staff members.
DID YOU KNOW?
➡️ Stores has topped up 3,642,930 stock items year to date.
➡️ The Stores department orders, picks and delivers out of fou warehouses (Main, CRITICAL, PANDEMIC AND LOWERY’S) Two of these are on-site and two off-site.
➡️ There are over 1591 unique items that are in the onsite warehouses, with a total on hand dollar value of nearly $2 million between the 4 warehouses.
➡️ Purchasing currently manages 2181 active contracts to ensure compliance and to deliver best value for money.
➡️ Collaboratively between Stores and Purchasing a total of 16,884 purchase orders have been issued this year!
National Day for Truth and Reconciliation (September 30th) honours the lost children and survivors of residential schools, their families and communities.
It was moving to see so many people wearing orange shirts, for September 30th is also Orange Shirt Day — an Indigenous-led grassroots commemorative day based on the experience of Phyllis Webstad, a Northern Secwpemc (Shuswap) from the Stswecem’c Xgat’tem First Nation. On her first day of school, she arrived dressed in a new orange shirt, which was taken from her. It is now a symbol of the stripping away of culture, freedom and self-esteem experienced by Indigenous children over generations.
Thank you to all Hospital and Health Research Institute staff, professional staff, volunteers and learners who participated by wearing orange shirts.
We hope you were able to take a few moments today to reflect on how people in our region have been, and continued to be, impacted.
Low-cost device developed to detect small breast cancer lesions is being improved to check other organs
Photo caption: Dr. Alla Reznik, centre, has been working on a medical imaging device that can be used to detect cancer in different parts of the body. She is pictured with Brandon Baldassi, left, and master’s student Anirudh Shahi. (Photo by Julio Heleno Gomes)
A Thunder Bay-based company and researchers at Lakehead University are refining technology they developed to spot early-stage breast cancer that may be used to scan other parts of the body. The device now being customized to provide diagnostic images of other organs is a significant advance in cancer screening, says the principal investigator.
“Basically it’s the same underlying technology but it’s the next step in the technology we use for detection of breast cancer,” says Dr. Alla Reznik. “It’s next-generation technology. It’s not just re-configuring because it represents the next evolutionary step.”
Reznik is a professor and the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in the Physics of Radiation Medical Imaging. Since joining Lakehead in 2008 she has continued her interest in radiation medical imaging technologies and, through the spin-off company Radialis Inc., has created a device to diagnose cancer in women with dense breast tissue where X-ray mammography is not sufficient. With a grant of $740,000 from the Canadian Institute for Health Research, Reznik and her team at Lakehead are upgrading the technology to seek different cancers, including prostate.
“At this stage our technology is customized for imaging in multiple organs, not only the breast,” Reznik says.
“This is an ongoing project, what we call ‘translational’ research, to turn an initial invention of a novel medical imaging technology to innovation. In order to achieve impactful research outcomes we need to navigate the whole journey, of research and development, then find clinical partners to prove the effectiveness of the technology, and then commercialization.”
The goal of this research is to come up with a versatile tool that can target different organs for imaging at high sensitivity and spatial resolution, explains graduate student Anirudh Shahi. Now in the second year of his master’s program, Shahi was attracted to the endeavour because it allows him to apply his physics background to tackle real-world problems in health care. He also appreciates the opportunity to expand his skill-set, working in disciplines ranging from fundamental physics to imaging software. He’s specifically involved in fusing data acquired from different angles around objects to improve the quality of the images generated.
“Such a tool can enable both accurate diagnosis and treatment monitoring of cancer patients in our community in the future,” says Shahi, who was born in India and grew up in Thunder Bay. “On a day-to-day basis, students from the community also benefit since they are given the opportunity to take part in a collaborative learning environment, lead research projects, and collaborate with industry.”
For Brandon Baldassi, there are unique challenges associated with applied physics in medicine.
“The idea of optimizing a complex physical system to address challenges in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer was very compelling,” he says of what drew him to this field.
Baldassi, a Thunder Bay native, studied medical physics at McMaster University. When he participated in Reznik’s lab as a summer student in 2016, he decided to pursue his master’s degree at Lakehead. After graduating this spring he joined Radialis as systems R & D lead and has found this project into organ-targeted positron emission tomography (PET) to be both more challenging and more rewarding than he initially expected.
“This research has the potential for significant clinical impact,” Baldassi states. “The commercialization of this technology offers great opportunity for student interns, new graduates, and local industry to flourish within the medical technology space.”
Reznik’s career in radiation medical imaging research centres on personalized or precision medicine — delivering the right treatment to the right patient at the right time. Personalized treatment needs to be supported with personalized diagnosis, she says. For imaging the breast, her technology addresses the crucial need for personalized diagnostic for women with radiologically dense breast tissue for whom conventional x-ray mammography is ineffective.
“Our organ-targeted technology offers much higher sensitivity so we can reduce the dose of radio pharmaceuticals,” Reznik says, adding that scan time goes from a typical 40 minutes to as little as five minutes. “So the device is more efficient, scanning time is shorter. What does this mean for hospitals? You can scan more patients, which means everything becomes much more cost-efficient.”
The Positron Emission Mammography (PEM) detector designed for breast cancer is a plug-in device the size of a shopping cart, meant to be compact enough to take to under-serviced communities. That technology has already undergone a series of clinical trials, and a second round is expected to take place in September.
Reznik says the market price for their device is $500,000, compared to $3-million for a whole-body PET scanner.
“So everything becomes much more efficient and we can see better, more accurate, more precise images – using lower amounts of radio pharmaceuticals and a lower-cost device,” she says.
Research Matters highlights the important work of researchers at Lakehead University.
Established in 2018, the Healthy Hospital Working Group (HHWG) is comprised of wellness leads from 48 hospitals across Canada as a way to exchange best practices and share innovative ways to support those working in health care.
You are invited to virtually attend a variety of workshops and educational sessions brought to you by the Healthy Hospital Working Group.
See poster below for schedule of events and descriptions.
Shared on behalf of Dr. Rhonda Crocker Ellacott, President & CEO, TBRHSC and CEO, TBRHRI
Hello, Boozhou, Bonjour.
As this is my first blog since the summer months, on behalf of the entire senior leadership team, please allow me to welcome back everyone who took time off to be with friends and family – and to sincerely thank those of you who worked hard during the summer as it was a very busy couple of months.
As you know, September traditionally signifies a new year for academics, and we welcome all those who are beginning a 2023 fall semester and are part of our Hospital and health research community. We are glad you are here, and we are hopeful you will onboard with us once you graduate.
This past month also provided many opportunities to celebrate differences through a lens of equity, diversity and inclusion. It was nice to see many of you attend the numerous activities.
Throughout the month within our Hospital, we appreciated the occasions that allowed us to reflect in honour of Truth and Reconciliation. The activities helped us gain knowledge to advance reconciliation and recognize the significance of Orange Shirt Day. This third “National Day for Truth and Reconciliation” was recognized by a sacred fire and beautiful sunrise ceremony with our community partners. The four-day event allows us an opportunity to mark this solemn day and be more informed and dedicated to understanding the trauma of residential schools. We continue to reflect and enable our minds into this new way of being and respect the resilience of Indigenous peoples and communities.
On September 25th, we raised the flag to celebrate Franco-Ontarian Day. We were pleased to have representatives from Association des francophones du Nord-Ouest de l’Ontario (AFNOO) and Réseau du mieux-être francophone du Nord de l’Ontario (Réseau) to mark the occasion. As an identified French Language Agency, designated under the French Language Services Act, we have an obligation to work towards providing services in French in accordance with our existing capacity.
We know that providing care that is culturally sensitive can improve health outcomes and quality of care. Our community continues to grow and is becoming more culturally diverse. We strive to expand on the way we provide care in a manner that provides culturally safe experience for all patients and staff, as reflected in our Strategic Plan 2026 – We all belong.
In case you are not aware, the grants for Family CARE (Care Advancement Recommended by Employees) are back and bigger than ever. Thanks to the Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Foundation, any program or health care provider is free to apply to have an idea or patient/family suggestion considered for funding. Family CARE grants are an opportunity to improve the care we provide in a small way with big impact. They improve care and also bring us joy in the way we provide care. Application details can be found here or by contacting the Foundation to find out more. Thank you for all who have previously submitted – it is through your extra effort that we will get closer to achieving our Vision.
Finally, as we look ahead, I wanted to take an opportunity to get you excited for our upcoming “Sharing and Caring” Event in October – our first since before the pandemic back in 2019. It is an opportunity to celebrate and continue to grow and embed our Patient and Family Centred Care (PFCC) philosophy. The week-long event (October 23-27) is sure to be well attended by many within our Hospital, community partners, patients and families. It is a week of events that includes educational lunch and learns, coffee rounds – Patient Family Advisors and staff sharing experience stories, education sessions, and many exhibitions that highlight how our Hospital is living our PFCC philosophy. There will be more details on this throughout October. I hope to see you there.
Thanks for taking the time to read this month’s blog. Please feel free to reach out to me with comments or for any other matter. You can reach me at: rhonda.ellacott@tbh.net.
As part of our commitment to keeping staff engaged and informed on the Strategic Plan 2026, Strategy and Performance is sharing updates in alignment with the identified priorities: Equity, Diversity & Inclusion, Patient Experience, Staff Experience and Research, Innovation, & Learning.
The September 27, 2023 Operational Updates and Strategic Planning Meeting featured leadership development, presented by by Jeannine Verdenik, Vice President, People & Culture and Amy Carr, Director, Human Resources.
Visit the Strategic Plan 2026 page on the Hospital’s corporate intranet, where these presentations, along with other resources can be found.
