Energizing scholarly activity in a regional medical campus.

Medical education is increasingly delivered at distributed sites away from Academic Health Sciences Centres. The Council of Ontario Faculties of Medicine recommends schools develop resources and metrics to foster regional campus scholarly activity. Opportunities for distributed program trainees must support learning core skills in research and critical appraisal to comply with medical school accreditation standards and to develop their interests and skills in scholarly work for their future medical careers.

Exploring Changes in Patient Safety Incidents During the COVID-19 Pandemic in a Canadian Regional Hospital System: A Retrospective Time Series Analysis.

Objectives: The COVID-19 pandemic has placed unprecedented strain on healthcare systems and may have consequential impacts on patient safety incidents (PSIs). The primary objective of this study was to examine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on PSIs reported in Niagara Health.

Methods: Flexible Farrington models were used to retrospectively detect weeks from January to September 2020 where PSI counts were significantly above expected counts.

Improving patient flow in a regional anaesthesia block room.

University Hospital is a tertiary academic centre in London, Ontario, Canada. A designated space known as the block room (BR) supports a model of care to perform regional anaesthesia prior to entering the resource intense operating room (OR). Stress due to time pressure was reported by BR staff.

A comparison of hospital-acquired pressure injuries in intensive care and non-intensive care units: a multifaceted quality improvement initiative.

Hospital-acquired pressure injuries (HAPI) are a significant cause of morbidity and mortality, and represent a major health concern worldwide. Patients suffering from HAPI report a poor quality of life on several dimensions of health. Moreover, HAPI is reported to lengthen in-hospital stay in the acute setting, posing significant healthcare resource utilisations and costs.

Reducing inappropriate ESR testing with computerized clinical decision support.

Laboratory test overutilization increases health care costs, leads to unwarranted investigations, and may have a negative impact on health outcomes. The American Society of Clinical Pathology, in its Choosing Wisely Campaign, advocates that inflammation be investigated with C-reactive protein (CRP) instead of Erythrocyte Sedimentation Rate (ESR). London Health Sciences Centre (LHSC), a tertiary care hospital organization in Ontario, Canada, set a goal to reduce inappropriate ESR orders by 50%.

Pulmonary artery hypertension in formerly premature infants with bronchopulmonary dysplasia: clinical features and outcomes in the surfactant era.

Background: Although abnormal pulmonary vascular structure and function in preterm infants with bronchopulmonary dysplasia may predispose infants to pulmonary artery hypertension, little is known about the characteristics and outcomes of bronchopulmonary dysplasia-associated pulmonary artery hypertension in the surfactant era.

Methods: We studied 42 premature infants (< 32 weeks of gestation) with bronchopulmonary dysplasia who were diagnosed as having pulmonary artery hypertension > or = 2 months after birth, between 1998 and 2006, at a median age of 4.8 months.

Arithmetic processing in children with spina bifida: Calculation accuracy, strategy use, and fact retrieval fluency.

Three studies compared 98 children with spina bifida myelomeningocele (SBM)-a disorder associated with high rates of math disability and spatial deficits-to 94 typically developing children on multidigit subtraction and cognitive addition tasks. Children with SBM were classified into those with reading decoding and math disability, only math disability, and no reading or math disability. Study 1 showed that visual-spatial errors in multidigit arithmetic were not elevated in children with SBM.