April 30th - attending a discussion at McMaster about how hospital cutback decisions are made? I'm interested in understanding more about how the Local Health Integration's Network (LHIN) came to the decision of making the emergency ward at McMaster Hospital peds-only in the face of public protest. Many people question whether this decision was made democratically with adequate public consultation (as far as I'm aware, students attending the university were not included in any talks), raising concerns about the LHIN's role at the local level. An ombuds investigation is currently underway to determine the legitimacy of these concerns.
I expect a raucous debate to ensue between the four different speakers (LHIN director, prez of HHS, MPP, and a rep. from the Ontario Health Coalition).
May 6th - attending Research Day for the Health Policy, Management, and Evaluation (HPME) Department at UofT. Looking forward to hearing guest speakers, networking with future colleagues, and looking at research posters. If med school doesn't work out for me this year, I will be doing graduate studies at the Master's level in Health Services Research.
The keynote speaker of the day is Kathleen Sutcliffe and she will be talking about "Organizing for Resilience." Seems interesting that her talk will bring a business flavour to the management of medical errors, a topic that I've only learned about from a bioethics perspective. Resilience is a word that also carries a lot of meaning in the psychology world, especially in the field of child development studies.
According to the day's schedule, a panel discussion will focus on accessing and integrating Mental Health Care. On April 15th, I attended Research Day for the Department of Psychology, Behaviour, and Neurosciences at McMaster University. The theme, which was on Psychiatric Disorder, Epidemiology and the Life Course, helped me conceptualize mental health disorders as developmental processes that are expressed in different ways over the lifespan. Given this paradigm shift, it is a daunting task for health policy-makers to ensure that mental health services are provided to those who need it. As a society, we may be better at identifying and framing mental health problems, but it remains to be determined whether we will have success in managing them on a system-wide level.
May 7th - participating in the second annual Hamilton Economic Summit. I was drawn to this community event because of the prospect of learning more about commercializing the downtown sector of Hamilton in order to create opportunities for economic development. I think the university can play an important role in this operation, and evidence of this is already emerging with the expansion of health services and education. Perhaps this may be a solution to the poverty issue in Hamilton.
Exciting days lined up for the next two weeks. I am clearly not ready to move on to the real world...
WC
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment