We're in the local news!

The good news:  Here's a little article that came out of the ALARM course we hosted at the LHEARN earlier this week.  Let's keep up the good work everyone!

DurhamRegion Article: Oshawa medical students get hands-on training on emergency births

The bad news:  According to the article, our residents may have been demoted back to being medical students...

Friday the 13th was a "Nightmares FM" day.

Shhh.

Here are some photos from QBOL's inaugural Nightmares FM course which took place last Thursday and Friday at the LHEARN Centre.  The LHEARN Centre is a recently opened facility housed at Lakeridge Health Oshawa which provides numerous teaching and meeting facilities including two brand new simulation labs.

(And yes, through some fortuitous and entirely unintentional planning, the second day of our Nightmares FM course did actually fall on Friday the 13th.)





This Nightmares FM course welcomed our batch of first year QBOL residents along with additional Queen's residents from other sites in a safe, non-judgemental learning environment.  The goal of this simulation course is to better prepare our future family physicians to respond confidently and competently to the needs of acutely ill patients.

Day 1 briefing session.

Ready to go!

We plan to take advantage of these state of the art facilities with refresher Nightmares FM courses and additional simulation courses.

QBOLers getting ready to roll.

Monitoring the scenario.

I also want to give special thanks to Dr. Randy Wax for assisting with the set up and mannequin support and to Drs. Aubrey Kassirer and Ed Osborne who were the primary instructors.  Your time, effort, preparation, and enthusiasm really helped to set the tone for our first simulation course and made for a very successful learning day!

A Midsummer Night's Dream

The Nightmares course will hopefully continue with great fun on Friday the 13th, and for lighter fare, the Bowmanville Visual Arts Centre is hosting the Bard's play outside (in if raining) on Sunday only. $15 at 7:30. Should be fun!

And we've launched!

It's been tremendously exciting the last couple days as we've welcomed our first batch of "live" residents to the QBOL site!  The weather over the past couple days has been a bit too damp and then a lot too hot / humid but it hasn't taken away from the true joy of seeing everybody's positive energy and enthusiasm so far.

Continuing the aerospace theme, we'll continue to try to give our residents a "boost" to start things off with our additional planned orientation activities throughout July before everyone settles in to their longitudinal learning experiences woven together with a Family Medicine thread in August.

Just a reminder to our preceptors to feel free to go to the separate preceptor blog (Behind the QBOL - link in the left hand bar on this screen) just to review or comment on things as we progress and a reminder to everybody to contact me with any questions or concerns.

Onwards and upwards!

Fiesta Week in Oshawa June 17-23, 2012

This time, let's try a non-medical post.  This is just a quick "head's up" for anybody who will be in the Durham area over the next week that Fiesta Week in Oshawa kicks off with a midday parade on Father's Day followed by a concert and then a week-long cornucopia of various cultural meals and local entertainment in multiple community centre pavilions all over the city. 

If this has whet your appetite, here is a link to their website: http://www.fiestaweek.ca. 

I'll just paraphrase the famous slogan by way of warning, "Fiesta Week: Tastes Great, Very Filling."

And who says this is the "middle of nowhere"?  ;)

Getting ready for summer.

We're now into June and, instead of heading towards the lazy days of summer, it is a veritable beehive of activity here as we ready for the arrival of our first eight residents.  Excitement is truly in the air!

We've repurposed the blog a bit as well as put in a nice summer photo of the lakefront that is pretty typical for Durham Region along the header here.  This blog will continue to provide information about our curriculum and communities as well as keep you abreast of highlights of the current activities of our residents and our site in general.  I have added a link (under the Web Links section to the side) which will now take our preceptors to a separate "invite-only" area to help support our faculty as we move forward.

Our toolbox month is shaping up nicely although it seems like a month might not be able to contain all of the great early residency learning experiences that we would like.  We shall see!

Doctor's Day 2012

Embarrassingly, I didn't realize that yesterday was Doctor's Day in Ontario until I received a notice from the Ontario College of Family Physicians well into the afternoon.  However, through this notice, I learned that May 1st was chosen as it was the birthday of Dr. Emily Stowe who became Canada's first female physician in 1870.

It still seems to be a fairly low key affair - it was difficult to find a nice description of Doctor's Day.  Here's a little news release from the OMA (It seems the first annual Doctor's Day was just last year which I find a little odd since we've been in Ontario a bit longer than a year...).  Sometimes I think we, as a profession, could do a better job educating the public about the various roles that physicians play in supporting the health of individuals and communities - especially those roles beyond direct patient care.

I think we will just have to make a point of really celebrating Doctor's Day next year!