Yesterday, staff at Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre may have received an email with the subject line, ‘Corporate Policy Review Declaration content change‘. Please disregard this email as it was sent in error.

We want to hear your ideas during Patient Safety Week! Help to inform our next Patient Safety Plan by clicking on the Slido link below, or by scanning the QR code with your smart phone, and sharing your thoughts:

https://app.sli.do/event/cxhpZHRaHtB6cKLhPT9ru2

If you have any questions, reach out to the Patient Safety Improvement Specialist, Terry Fodë, by calling extension 6754 or emailing Terry.Fode@tbh.net.

Our Hospital is joining others across the country by celebrating Respiratory Therapy Week from October 22-28.

Respiratory therapists (RTs) are highly-skilled health care professionals. They have specialized medical expertise and use their knowledge and skills to provide safe, high-quality care. If you have medical problems that may be caused by cardiorespiratory or respiratory-related issues, RTs are the experts who will work with you to diagnose, treat and manage your condition.

Within our Hospital there are always RTs working hard 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, across all patient populations. RTs are a vital part of the front-line care team in many areas including the intensive care unit, the emergency department, operating rooms, NICU, outpatient clinics and home care. RTs perform a variety of vital roles throughout our Hospital. They are called for all high-risk deliveries including C-sections, traumas, conscious sedations, cardioversions, puffer administration and education, arterial blood gases, insertion of arterial catheters, non-invasive mechanical ventilation, (like CPAPs or BiPAPs), high flow oxygen therapy, and so much more.

Leadership Roles for RTs

Respiratory therapists use their skills and knowledge to take on various leadership roles throughout our Hospital. Darolyn Hryciw is the RRT (Registered Respiratory Therapist) Charge and her role consists of managing day-to-day operations, scheduling, and equipment and supplies management. Bruno Tassone is the Critical Care and Respiratory Services Coordinator. He is responsible for the day-to-day operations of the Regional Critical Care Response Team (RCCRT) as well as the Medical Emergency Team. Jennifer Gadioma is an Interprofessional Educator. She is responsible for hospital-wide education to all staff. Shawn Jacobson is the Education Lead and he organizes all the education and clinical placements for the Respiratory Therapy students from Canadore College. Jason Walt does special projects for the Respiratory Therapy department, including educating staff and developing policies. Aaron Giba is the Professional Practice Lead for the Respiratory Department, and provides leadership and guidance in everyday practice as well as policy development and implementation.

Operating Room

The anesthesia assistant (AA) is an essential member of the Operating Room (OR) team. AAs are respiratory therapists who have an additional 18 months of training in advanced anesthesia skills in order to facilitate the administration of anesthetic services, both in an out of the OR. Within the OR, they assist with the setup and induction of anesthesia for more complex surgical cases. Their duties include advanced airway management, line insertion as well as assistance with epidural/spinal blocks, peripheral nerve blocks and difficult intubation protocols. AAs can prepare and administer a variety of anesthetic agents and manage stable patients under anesthesia while the anesthetist performs other duties within the OR. They also maintain and troubleshoot all anesthesia equipment and are often called upon to assist with anesthetic emergencies. They prepare the OR for malignant hyperthermia cases and are well-versed in the management of this rare but life-threatening emergency. Outside of the OR, AAs set up and assist with sedation cases in diagnostic imaging that require advanced monitoring and generally facilitate any off-service anesthetic duty. The introduction of AAs have allowed anesthesia services to expand at a time when anesthesia resources are very limited.

Outpatient clinics, Stress lab, Pulmonary Function Testing lab

Respiratory therapists also provide care in outpatient clinics and our diagnostic area. They conduct tests to measure lung function and teaching people to manage asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder among other cardiac and lung functions.

When: October 24, 2023
Time: 12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m.
Location: Zoom webinar

Registration is required to attend this event. Click HERE.

As Canada’s health care system struggles with workforce challenges, surgical backlogs, wait times, and optimizing unnecessary interventions, technology adoption and the shift to delivering digital care improves access to care, the patient experience, and enables higher-value care models. Due to the staff and resource intensive approach of traditional device-based Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) that can only be used for a small percentage of patients, leading healthcare organizations are adopting Digital Care Journeys to extend the benefits of RPM for broader populations such as surgery, women’s health, oncology and chronic care. 

Hear how deploying a SaaS-based, EHR-integrated Digital Care Journey platform enables providers to scale engagement, monitor, and stay connected with all patients throughout their healthcare journeys, discharge patients sooner, increase surgical throughput and enable safer transitions from hospital to home. The discussion will cover how the platform delivers interactive patient education and workflows that self guide patients through their personalized care journeys and how care teams have access to real-time dashboards to remotely monitor patient progress, get alerted to patients at-risk and leverage population level insights to improve care.

You’ll learn how:

• Combining evidence-based, clinical content with digital guidance for patients from pre-admission through post-discharge recovery leads to lower LOS, ED visits, readmissions, phone calls, and costs.
• Digitally-enabled, patient-self-management workflows allow 80%+ of patient issues to be addressed without remote monitoring by a provider – reducing phone calls.
• Orchestrating a system-wide integration and rollout of a digital care solution with your EHR and patient portal streamlines clinical workflows and efficiencies.

Presented by: 

Dr. Joshua Liu is a physician turned entrepreneur. He is currently the CEO and Co-founder of SeamlessMD, which provides the leading Digital Care Journey platform for health systems to engage, monitor and stay connected with patients across healthcare journeys.

Joshua graduated as a medical doctor from the University of Toronto. During his medical training, he co-led a research project at UHN on hospital readmissions and sat on UHN’s physician advisory group for post-hospital discharge follow up. As a result, Joshua was inspired to develop technology to better support patients and prevent adverse outcomes such as a readmission – which ultimately led to him co-founding SeamlessMD.

An advocate for healthcare innovation, Joshua has served as Chair of the Canadian Medical Association’s Joule Innovation Council and on the Advisory Group to the Office of the Chief Health Innovation Strategist for the Ontario Ministry of Health. Joshua has received numerous honours, including being named Digital Health Executive of the Year by Digital Health Canada, Forbes 30 Under 30 in Science and Healthcare, and Canadian Top 20 Under 20. 

Dr. Liu holds a MD from the University of Toronto and a BSc from York University.

Caroline Fanti is the Director of the Regional Surgical Services at Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre. Her educational background includes a Masters in Health Management, completion of the Rotman NW LHIN Health Leadership Program, an Honour’s Bachelor of Science in Physical Therapy and an Honour’s Bachelor of Science in Human Kinetics. 

Caroline’s passion lies with the development and implementation of innovative regionally integrated programs and best practice models of care for patients of Northwestern Ontario. Programs such Centralized Intake, Rapid Access Clinics, Remote Patient Monitoring and Bundled Care leverage leading edge technologies, efficient use of resources, virtual care and inter-professional care teams to connect patients with the most appropriate specialists; provide the right care at the right time; decrease wait times, support admission avoidance; optimize patient flow; and ensure personalized transitions of care.

Through successful engagement of urban, rural and remote health system partners, Caroline has played an instrumental role in regional care system planning in order to champion capacity building and intelligent health system transformation. Caroline received the RBC Innovation Hero of the Year in 2021.

Andriana Lukich is the Director, Digital Solutions at St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton. She holds a HBSc Kinesiology and an MBA from McMaster University, a PMP certification and is Prosci Change Management certified. Throughout her decade of healthcare experience, she has held multiple roles all focused on leading change initiatives and supporting staff and physicians through transformational projects. 

The signature Indigenous diabetes wellness event of the year is taking place on Thursday, October 26. Don’t miss this great event. Register online.

Date: Monday, October 23, 2023

Time: 12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m.

Location(s):

NOSM U in Thunder Bay – ATAC6022
NOSM U in Sudbury – MSE322

Join via Webex

Learning Objectives:

• The fundamentals of AI methodology.

• How AI has been applied in public health to date.

• How public health practitioners and researchers view the potential of AI to impact public health research and practice.

Speakers:
Dr. Jaky Kueper, Dr. Laura Rosella, Dr. Dan Lizotte

Dr. Jaky Kueper, PhD, is a postdoctoral research associate who recently finished the first combined PhD in epidemiology and computer science at the University of Western Ontario. Her work integrates epidemiology and machine learning to use “everyday data” such as electronic health records to support primary health care and population health. Her PhD research was recognized by a CIHR Banting and Best Doctoral Fellowship and the Governor General’s Gold Medal. She also serves as the TechForward Fellow at the College of Family Physicians of Canada, leading initiatives related to artificial intelligence, family medicine, and compassionate care.

Dr. Laura Rosella, PhD is an Associate Professor in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, where she holds the Canada Research Chair in Population Health Analytics and leads the Population Health Analytics Lab, which focuses on developing methods and tools to use population-level data to inform health system decision-making. She holds Inaugural Stephen Family Research Chair in Community Health at the Institute for Better Health, Trillium Health Partners and scientific appointments at Vector AI Institute and the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. In 2021, Dr. Rosella was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars in recognition of international impact in advancing population health. She leads training at the Temerty Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research and Education in Medicine (T-CAIREM) and the Data Sciences Institute at the University of Toronto. Dr. Rosella leads a Pan-Canadian team that launched in 2022 known as AI for Public Health (AI4PH), which is focused on building capacity in AI and big data skills for transformative change in addressing population and public health challenges and understanding how these tools impact health equity

Dr. Dan Lizotte, PhD, is Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at The University of Western Ontario. His research aims to support health decision-making by developing and applying machine learning and statistical tools to new sources of data including electronic health records and social media to better support patients and health professionals, particularly in public health and primary health care. His methodological research combines machine learning, optimal sequential decision-making, and multiple objective optimisation. Dr. Lizotte has been formally teaching AI methods to a diverse set of students for over ten years, and he teaches the Public Health Informatics course for in the Schulich Interfaculty Program in Public Health at Western. He is also a member of the Rotman Institute of Philosophy at Western, and he has a strong interest in intersectionality and other critical social theory and how they should inform the development and deployment of AI tools that support health equity. He is currently working with the Alliance for Healthier Communities to develop tools for research and decision support.

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This one-credit-per-hour Group Learning program meets the certification criteria of the College of Family Physicians of Canada and has been certified by the Continuing Education and Professional Development Office at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine for up to 1.00 Mainpro+ credits.

Health care plant maintenance, planning and engineering staff are the in-house professionals responsible for facilities management, planning, development and maintenance of complex health care systems, equipment and facilities. Our health care facilities rely on these staff to provide the necessary skills and resources to develop and manage the environment of care within our organization in an efficient manner and with the patient in mind.

October 15-21 is National Health Care Facilities and Engineering Week, and it is meant to recognize and honour the plant, maintenance, planning and engineering staff on behalf of all who benefit from them. Please join us in thanking these staff members for their contributions in maintaining a safe, secure and functioning environment for our Hospital.

RNAO (Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario) is celebrating its ninth annual Fall Tour. 

RNAO’s Lakehead Chapter is very proud to have had our application accepted – we’ve been selected as one of the stops along RNAO’s Fall Tour.

Dr. Claudette Holloway, President of RNAO, will be visiting Thunder Bay on Wednesday, October 18, 2023.

The Fall Tour is an opportunity for Lakehead Chapter members to meet Dr. Holloway. She will be speaking about RNAO’s advocacy and priorities. Join us and discuss your thoughts/ideas and ask questions related to nursing, health and health care.

About our guest speaker:

Dr. Claudette Holloway is the President of RNAO, the professional association representing registered nurses, nurse practitioners and nursing students in the province of Ontario. She has a bachelor’s degree from Ryerson, a master’s degree in nursing from D’Youville College, Buffalo, New York and a Doctorate in Health Administration from the University of Phoenix. In Canada, Claudette has more than 35 years of nursing experience, including 10 years of leadership as a program manager at Toronto Public Health, district administration for St. Elizabeth Visiting Nurses in Toronto, and nurse manager at the John Noble Homes for the Aged in Brantford, Ontario. She is passionate about promoting the nursing profession, decreasing, and eliminating anti-black racism and all forms of racism and discrimination in nursing and the health-care system.

What: Lakehead Chapter Fall Tour — Meet and Greet with RNAO President Dr. Claudette Holloway
When: Wednesday, October 18, 1:00 p.m. – 2:30 p.m.
Where: ICP Main Meeting Room 2178, Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre

Registration is required (CLICK HERE). Open to Lakehead Chapter members, and nursing staff.

Pharmacy Technician Day (October 17) recognizes the invaluable contributions made by Registered Pharmacy Technicians who work tirelessly to ensure patients receive their medications safely and accurately.

The role of a pharmacy technician is an integral part of any pharmacy operation, including Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre. With many new responsibilities, such as an expanded role in medication reconciliation and management of our Automated Medication Dispensing Units (Omnicell ®), it is important to take some time to appreciate all that our pharmacy technician team does for our patients, their families and staff. Please take this day to show your support for our pharmacy technician team.

Are you or someone you know interested in pursuing a career as a pharmacy technician?

In order to enroll in one of the 23 current pharmacy technician programs in Ontario, you’ll need an Ontario Secondary School Diploma or equivalent, a grade 12 English credit, and grade 11/12 math and sciences credits. The programs are generally 18-24 months in duration. In order to ensure that the program you’re considering is accredited by the Ontario College of Pharmacists (OCP), visit https://ccapp.ca/canadian-pharmacy-technician-programs/

Pharmacy technicians are regulated under the OCP in order to practice. Once you’ve completed an accredited program, you’ll need to meet the requirements from the OCP to become registered and work in the field.