Canada’s biggest medical research competition, Angels Den, is back – returning in-person, at Meridian Hall, for its 9th year. On October 11, 2023, six teams of St. Michael’s Hospital’s top scientists will pitch their groundbreaking research projects to judges and jurors for a chance at $500,000 in funding.
Amongst the contestants are MAP scientists Dr. Sean Rourke, Dr. Aaron Orkin, and Dr. Carolyn Snider. Watch their videos below to learn about the projects that they will be pitching.
The Ontario Community Health Profiles Partnership (OCHPP) and Ontario Health, Central Region (OH) are very excited to announce the creation of 194 new local areas in Central Region!
Central is one of six new Ontario Health Regions established from the previous 14 Local Health Integration Networks (LHINs). OH Central is comprised of four former LHINs: Central, Central West, Mississauga Halton and North Simcoe Muskoka.
Creating 194 Local Areas
The OCHPP team, located at MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions under the leadership of Rick Glazier, PI, and OH team have been working hard over the last year to develop local areas for the vast area covered by OH Central Region. The new 194 local areas comprise over four million people who reside in the fast-growing and diverse communities from Mississauga to Huntsville and Orangeville to Markham. (As a note, some jurisdictions refer to small areas as neighbourhoods but OH refers to theirs as local areas.)
Why Local Areas?
Local-level data can tell you a lot about the characteristics of a community, what shapes health care utilization, and where the biggest opportunities exist for improving health. In most regions, health and social data are available at a national, provincial, and municipal level to inform planning. However, it’s easy for the needs of local communities to get ‘averaged out’ when planners do not have access to local-area data. Neighbouring communities can have drastically different pictures of health and well-being, despite their close physical proximity. These differences are only visible in the data when we are able to break down the information and look at each local area separately.
The Process
The OCHPP and OH teams used an array of spatial reference and census data when developing local areas. Geographical information system (GIS) tools and methods were used to process data and ultimately define the new areas. Specifically, standard Census geographies were used as the building blocks for the new areas. Using a standard approach often makes analyzing and reporting data more accessible and efficient. In several instances, the team tweaked boundaries in order to ensure equal distribution of populations. An understanding of local communities, the use of existing local areas along with natural and constructed boundaries also informed the process.
The process also involved the testing and validation of populations within areas. We created our areas with population sizes that range from a minimum of 7,000 to a maximum of 30,000 people so that health outcomes would be reportable thus reducing the risk that cells with low counts would prohibit release of data due to privacy restrictions. Other factors included sufficient population size to allow for stratification by age group and sex as well as considering the stability of data over time and ability to account for changes in population dynamics within an area.
Important consideration was given to ensuring that areas identified as First Nations or Indigenous communities would not have their data reflected in the outcomes without their permission, owing to the lack of partnership agreements in place with these communities and to respect the principles of OCAP. These areas are identified in the local areas but no data will be reported.
Especially important is the northern reach of these local areas. Health system planning is crucially important to places that might historically and currently have difficulty accessing healthcare. By reporting health and socio-demographics at these small areas, planners will have additional tools to demonstrate gaps in care within their jurisdictions.
OCHPP: Partners and Public Website
Perhaps the best part of this collaboration is that all of the local area data (and any accompanying) maps will be available to anyone via the OCHPP website.
OCHPP partners include provincial and local governments, public health professionals, community health providers and researchers. We work together to build community capacity to use health information. One way we do this is by providing local area health and socio-demographic data in easy to use tables and maps on a freely-accessible website.
OCHPP partners contribute in many different ways but all share a common goal of using data to help inform and implement policies that reduce health inequities in Ontario.
We look forward to continuing to populate and add data for Ontario Health Central Region over the next year and beyond. See the Ontario Health Central Region page and local area data here: https://www.ontariohealthprofiles.ca
This project is one more step in the OCHPP goal of “mapping Ontario one small area at a time.” We are honoured to have worked closely with OH Central on this important and equity-based project.
For more information or to find out about methods used to create the new areas please contact: healthprofiles@smh.ca
A new report from The Ontario Drug Policy Research Network and Public Health Ontario shows the number of accidental drug and alcohol toxicity-related deaths grew to alarmingly high levels in Ontario during the COVID-19 pandemic.
There were almost 9,000 accidental deaths from substance-related toxicities in the province from 2018-2021 – reaching an unprecedented rate that was five times higher than the number of deaths due to motor vehicle collisions in Ontario.
The report found that the annual number of substance toxicity deaths nearly doubled in Ontario during this time, reaching nearly 3,000 deaths in 2021, with an average of eight deaths occurring every day that year.
“This report shows the extent to which substance-related harms have worsened during the pandemic,” says senior author Dr. Tara Gomes, a scientist at the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute of St. Michael’s Hospital and ICES, and a principal investigator of the ODPRN.
“During the pandemic, for the first time, the number of deaths involving multiple substances surpassed deaths from one substance alone, highlighting the increasing complexity of this issue and the types of responses required to prevent these avoidable harms.”
Un nouveau rapport du Ontario Drug Policy Research Network et de Santé publique Ontario révèle que le nombre de décès accidentels liés à la toxicité des drogues et de l’alcool a atteint des niveaux alarmants en Ontario pendant la pandémie de COVID-19.
Près de 9 000 décès accidentels dus aux effets toxiques liés aux substances ont été enregistrés dans la province entre 2018 et 2021, atteignant un taux sans précédent de cinq fois supérieur au nombre de décès dus à des collisions de véhicules à moteur en Ontario.
Le rapport indique que le nombre annuel de décès dus à la toxicité des substances a presque doublé en Ontario au cours de cette période, atteignant près de 3 000 en 2021, soit une moyenne de huit décès par jour cette année-là.
Amid an ever-widening family doctor shortage, an Ontario university is hoping to start turning the tide with a dedicated program – but some experts say that to fix the problem in the long run, we may need to reimagine our health-care system completely.
This month, first-year medical students are beginning their training to become family doctors – part of a brand new, innovative program taking aim at the critical shortage of general practitioners.
Though urgently needed, fewer and fewer med school graduates choose family practice.
This at a time when 6.5 million Canadians now have no access to primary care, and the country is expected to be short 30,000 family doctors by 2028.
“It means that for those people, really, the front door to the health-care system is closed,” Dr. Tara Kiran, a family doctor and researcher at St. Michael’s Hospital, told CTV National News. “And so they’re left without anywhere to turn if they get sick, but also even to keep them well, manage their chronic conditions. They don’t have the care that they need.”
A Toronto supervised consumption site has been in the spotlight after an employee was charged in connection with a fatal daytime shooting near the centre in July, spurring a provincial government review of all sites in the province.
But when it comes to who’s responsible for the sites, the answer is complex.
The federal, provincial and municipal governments are all part of a system of approvals, funding and oversight that allow the sites to operate. According to Toronto Public Health, there are 10 sites in the city and six of them — including the South Riverdale Community Health Centre (SRCHC) — are provincially funded consumption treatment services. Among the sites that are not provincially designated consumption treatment service locations, one is not open to the public, one is Toronto Public Health’s and another relies on donations.
People in the community around the SRCHC have pointed to increasing concerns in the past year on safety and cleanliness in the area. As a not-for-profit, the site says the more funding it dedicates to security, less gets spent on providing care for clients. Meanwhile, the city councillor for the area hopes the province will provide more funding to help offset that cost.
Supervised consumption sites do provide multiple benefits, says Dr. Ahmed Bayoumi, a physician and researcher at St. Micheal’s Hospital in Toronto. Bayoumi was part of a team that was tasked with looking at whether the cities of Toronto and Ottawa would benefit from the implementation of supervised injection facilities.
“There is research showing that people who use supervised consumption sites have lower rates of overdose and lower rates of fatal overdose than people who don’t,” Bayoumi said. “The sites help to connect people to other services that are useful, both social services and health services, things like stable housing and employment.”
The Toronto offices for Kamran Khan’s BlueDot, which uses artificial intelligence to flag potential infectious disease outbreaks around the world, are located at the edge of Lake Ontario – appropriate for a company that, similar to a lighthouse, signals when there’s danger ahead.
“We use the internet as a medium for surveillance to detect early signals of outbreaks anywhere in the world before they’re officially reported by public health agencies,” explains Khan, a scientist at Unity Health Toronto and a professor in the department of medicine in the University of Toronto’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine and the Dalla Lana School of Public Health.
He breaks BlueDot’s work down into three key components: identifying threats early, rapidly assessing their risks and likely trajectories, and helping organizations to turn these insights into swift action.
“The whole purpose here is to compress time, because ultimately, time is the enemy when you’re dealing with an outbreak,” says Khan, a member of U of T’s Centre for Vaccine Preventable Diseases.
BlueDot’s intelligence platform combines a computer’s ability to understand human language, known as natural language understanding (NLU), and machine learning, a form of AI that imitates humans’ ability to learn and gradually become more accurate. The platform sorts through massive volumes of online information – ranging from news reports, social media sites, government websites, and more – from around the globe, in more than 130 languages, every 15 minutes of every day.
New research suggests “surgical sexism” is baked into the Canadian health-care system, revealing surgeons are paid less for procedures on female patients than they are for comparable surgeries on male patients.
The Toronto-based study, published in the Canadian Journal of Surgery earlier this month, found doctors are compensated on average 28 per cent less for operations on female patients than they are for similar procedures performed on male patients.
“The overarching message when we hear about studies like this is that society or the Ministry of Health doesn’t value women’s health to the degree that it should,” Dr. Andrea Simpson, an OB/GYN at St. Michael’s Hospital, told CTV News Toronto.
For the study, Sunnybrook Hospital OB/GYN Dr. Michael Chaikof said his research group created a list of common procedures performed exclusively on female patients and paired it with equivalent surgeries for patients with a male reproductive anatomy.
Then, they collected data on how much doctors were paid for these procedures in eight provinces and compared the lists.
The result: doctors performing surgeries on female patients made nearly $44 less per procedure than they did on male patients.
For example, a surgeon is paid over 50 per cent more for untwisting a testicle than for untwisting an ovary, despite the latter requiring a more technical internal procedure.
“There is nowhere in Canada where you earn more for operating on a female patient than a male patient,” Chaikof said.
A man with a history of attacking strangers on TTC property “presents a danger to the public” if he doesn’t take his antipsychotic medication, a judge said this month as courts increasingly point to the urgent need for more housing and mental health services to deal with random assaults.
Ontario Court Justice Hafeez Amarshi sentenced Nigel White to jail for yet another series of assaults at a subway station this year. Amid a number of seemingly random attacks on Toronto public transit, Amarshi’s ruling lays bare the limitations of the criminal justice system in dealing with the problem.
The rising number of incidents on the TTC is the result of a system that is failing to cope due to a lack of resources, said community psychiatrist Dr. Samuel Law with St. Michael’s Hospital, noting the need for better followup for individuals leaving jails with mental health issues.
“Just having more cops on the TTC is not going to solve this; it’s actually much harder,” he said. “It’s the bigger work of building our community infrastructure and treating this more seriously.”
Team-based care can improve patient access and alleviate pressure on family physicians.
But in a survey of over 9,000 people in Canada, only 15% of respondents said they had access to health professionals in their primary care clinic beyond a doctor, nurse or nurse practitioner.
The research is part of OurCare, a national project to engage the public on the future of primary care in Canada. It’s led by Dr. Tara Kiran, who is the Fidani Chair in Improvement and Innovation at the University of Toronto and a family physician with the St. Michael’s Hospital Academic Family Health Team.
Ahead of her appearance at the CMA’s 2023 Health Summit, we spoke to Dr. Kiran about why Canada needs more team-based care— and what it will take to make it the norm.
It is indeed a crisis. Primary care is the front door to the health system— and when you look at demographic trends, both for physicians and the population, you can see that there won’t be enough family doctors to go around for years to come.
That’s where team-based care comes in. We need to build a system that expands the capacity of our existing family doctors and other primary care clinicians so they can serve more patients.
Not every problem needs to be seen by a family doctor. People with diabetes who have stable blood sugar levels can often be seen by a nurse. Physiotherapists have incredible skill when it comes to assessing musculoskeletal conditions. Social workers can connect seniors to meal supports or other programs in the community.
We really have to rethink the structure of primary care so we maximize the value of both physicians and other health professionals.
From Global News
Thomas Mohr, an Oakville man who became homeless after his leg was amputated, continues living in his vehicle at an Oakville shopping plaza. It’s now been 238 days.
Mohr had been a carpenter for decades. After he lost his leg due to medical reasons, the 69-year-old claims the government has refused to cover the costs of a customized prosthetic. He has what is called a ‘bulbous stump,’ meaning the base of his limb is larger in width than his knee. Mohr’s family has been trying to raise money since to get him a prosthetic from the U.S. that costs C$80,000 so that he can return to work.
Global News’ initial story was published on June 20. Mohr said two days later, he was approached by outreach workers with Halton region accompanied by police officers to provide housing support.
When asked why officers were present, Halton police spokesperson Ryan Anderson said: “At that time officers assisted Halton Housing Help in connecting an individual with a temporary residence. The HRPS was not involved with the seizure of a truck or any other personal belongings.”
“This case is really a microcosm of so many issues we’re facing,” said Dr. Andrew Pinto, director of The Upstream Lab at St. Michael’s Hospital. “One is the ‘silo-ing’ between his health providers, the housing authorities, the social services agencies.”
Pinto said that in addition to there being a lack of cohesion among governments and social services agencies, the system has failed Mohr and so many others trying to access housing with a disability.
“We have not dedicated anything like we needed to in terms of adequate housing, particularly for people who have a disability,” he said.
“We have tremendous waitlists of years and years where people are waiting to access affordable housing.”
Halton Region told Global News that it responded once it learned of Mohr’s case.
