CMAJ News • 25th March 2021

Dr. Alika Lafontaine reimagines the narrative of medicine

Dr. Alika Lafontaine thinks a lot about narratives and how the stories we tell can shape outcomes. His own success – as an anesthesiologist, a leader in transforming Indigenous health care, and soon, the first Indigenous president of the Canadian Medical Association – can be traced to his parents’ refusal to accept an early narrative about him.

Today's Parent • 17th January 2021

The Condo Kids

From murphy beds to multifunctional tables, these parents have gotten creative with less space. Here, they share the challenges, how they're making it work and why they're staying put.

CMAJ News • 10th November 2020

Why some doctors want to defund the police

Medical student Semir Bulle knows what it’s like to live in fear of the police. A child of Ethiopian refugees, he was carded a dozen times in one year while growing up in northwestern Ontario. Bulle says those interactions sent a message: “The police are going to be watching me, and I have to be sure I’m looking nonsuspicious, so they don’t try to harass me today.” Only later, in university, Bulle realized that his white classmates had very different experiences.

University Affairs • 2nd September 2020

Researchers investigate the effectiveness of public health messaging during the pandemic

Stay home. Flatten the curve. Stay two metres apart. Stick to your “social bubble.” Wear a mask. To reduce the spread of COVID-19, public health authorities have been instructing us to change our behaviours at a dizzying pace. As Canadians try to square the latest advice, university researchers and lecturers have been taking notes. Academics from public health to English to philosophy are looking at what’s being said, how it’s being said and – most importantly – how these messages are resonating.

CMAJ • 28th August 2020

What about the wait times Canada isn’t tracking? | CMAJ News

Janet Lunn was on a waitlist for four years to see a neurologist in Halifax for pain that felt like “an immense amount of pressure” on her temple and behind her eye. The pain would wake her up in the night, often only allowing her a few hours of sleep. “I started developing anxiety about going to sleep because I knew the pain would hit,” Lunn says. While she waited for specialist care, she lost her job, and her long-term relationship ended – both events she attributes partly to her lack of sleep.

The Local • 25th August 2020

Are Noisy Hospitals Making Us Sick?

Since implementing a noise reduction program at her hospital five years ago, Soong is particularly attuned to the dips and peaks of hospital volume. She knows that the noise problem at hospitals is a serious one. More than just an annoyance for patients and staff, excessive noise can lead to lack of sleep, delirium, longer recovery times, and even addiction to tranquilizers. If a hospital’s mission is to improve the health of its patients, then noise is one of the biggest hurdles.

CMAJ • 21st August 2020

Physician billing data reveal striking gender pay gap

An Ontario Medical Association (OMA) analysis has found a 15.6% unexplained pay gap between female and male physicians. The analysis, based on billings from doctors to the Ontario Health Insurance Plan, accounted for years in practice, specialty, days worked, and other factors to make an “apples-to-apples” comparison.

CMAJ • 20th August 2020

Abortion clinic websites blocked at Toronto hospital | CMAJ News

St. Joseph’s Health Centre in Toronto is no longer blocking staff access to some abortion clinic websites, after CMAJ questioned the Catholic hospital about the practice as part of researching this article. CMAJ spoke to three physicians at St. Joseph’s who expressed concern that abortion clinic websites were blocked by an internal firewall.

CMAJ • 27th July 2020

Virtual care is here to stay, but major challenges remain

Before the pandemic, Vancouver resident Sarah Hornstein didn’t like the idea of virtual health care. Newly diagnosed with asthma shortly before the shutdown, she worried that virtual care would be “more about efficiency” than quality. “It’s hard enough to get a doctor’s time,” Hornstein says. But after several virtual care visits, Hornstein says she was “surprised by how well it’s working.”

TVO.org • 16th June 2020

Fear, neglect, and close quarters: Inside Ontario’s migrant-worker health crisis

In late May, Amy Cohen, an organizer with Radical Action With Migrants in Agriculture, in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley, received a WhatsApp message from a migrant farm worker in Ontario. He and another worker were in the bunkhouse, their living quarters on farm property, because they were too sick to work that day. His friend was vomiting, short of breath, and losing consciousness. Could she call an ambulance?

Ryerson University Magazine • 1st June 2020

A life in photos: Edward Burtynksy

Edward Burtynsky (Photographic Arts, ’82) is world-renowned for his massive, incredibly detailed, and arresting vistas of places we wouldn’t otherwise see: the turquoise pools of lithium mines; oil pump jacks and rigs that stretch into the vast horizon; jagged slabs of a gargantuan marble quarry.

Today's Parent • 1st June 2020

Here's what we now know about how coronavirus affects kids

In early March, when Lauren Rowello’s 7-year-old got a fever and started coughing, COVID-19 briefly crossed her mind. Her spouse and 10-year old son had been coughing too, but they weren’t at all fatigued and had no other symptoms. She thought, “If this is COVID-19, then it’s not going to be that bad for me if I get it,” she recalls.

CMAJ • 25th May 2020

Surgery backlog crisis looming

Doctors and health care leaders are worried about Canada’s growing backlog of urgent surgeries as non-emergency procedures have been dramatically scaled back or delayed due to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) for almost two months now.

Macleans.ca • 2nd May 2020

It's time to stop giving the message that kids can't play outside

For almost two months now, the primary public health message across Canada, and especially in Ontario, has been “stay home.” In cities, exercise outside is allowed, ideally in quiet areas at off-peak times, but not exactly encouraged. Guidance around outdoor exercise has principally been for adults. As the provincial chief medical officer of health, Dr. David Williams, put it, the rules shouldn’t stop “anyone from going out for their morning jog.” Children’s need for outdoor activity seems to have been neglected altogether.

The Local • 19th April 2020

PSWs: On the front of the COVID19 frontlines

Three weeks ago, Maria Isabel Gilbert felt so exhausted she needed to lie down on the couch. Over the next few hours, she developed a fever. The next few days brought a headache, dry throat, diarrhea, and chills. “I thought, ‘Oh boy, this is it,’” says Gilbert. This, of course, being COVID-19.

CMAJ News • 27th March 2020

Uncalm before the storm

These are anxious days for most people, but especially for the health workers who are preparing for worse still to come as cases of COVID-19 multiply across Canada. Some health care workers are balancing long hours at work with coordinating childcare and supports for elderly parents. Other have chosen to isolate themselves to keep loved ones safe if they get sick, given dwindling supplies protective equipment.

CMAJ News • 6th March 2020

Indigenous youth co-develop a new way to measure their health

Indigenous communities across Canada are adapting a new way of measuring child and youth wellbeing with a tool co-designed by Indigenous youth. Those behind the tool say Indigenous-developed health measures are desperately lacking, although vitally important as communities continue to contend with the mental health fallout of colonization.

University Affairs • 4th March 2020

Why medical faculties are broadening admissions criteria

Gabby Schoettle, a first-year medical student at Western University, was 8 years old when she lost her mother to breast cancer. In high school, when her father’s health started deteriorating, she took on the role of making meals for her younger brother and caring for her father. In her final year of high school, her father passed away. She and her brother had to work to pay the mortgage. “We had to learn a lot of things on the fly,” says Ms. Schoettle.

Today's Parent • 27th February 2020

What parents need to know as the coronavirus spreads

The coronavirus, or COVID-19, continues to spread, and has now infected more than 80,000 people worldwide. While most of those cases are in China, outbreaks have surfaced in South Korea, Italy and Iran. The World Health Organization has said to be prepared for a pandemic, and the Centers for Disease Control in the United States warned on Feb 25 that the outbreak could cause a “severe disruption” to the lives of ordinary Americans. In Canada, chief medical officer of health Teresa Tam said on Feb

CMAJ News • 20th February 2020

Proposed protocol to keep COVID-19 out of hospitals

At-home testing and monitoring of possible COVID-19 cases could ease pressure on hospitals and emergency services and prevent the spread of infection, say experts. Public health officials, hospital leaders and paramedics in the Champlain Local Health Integration Network in Ontario are working on a protocol to do just that. Under the proposed protocol, people suspected to have COVID-19 would be assessed, swabbed and monitored at home by specially trained paramedics in protective equipment.