COUNCIL AWARD
Outreach program
provides help
to community
ED doctors
Dr. Sarah Reid
I
magine you are a doctor working in a general
emergency department in a small town in North-
ern Ontario. On your shift so far, you have seen
a woman with migraine, a man with chest pain,
an elderly lady with dizziness and a 20-year-old with a
sore throat. Your next patient is a two-year-old with a
three day history of fever. Her heart rate is 180. Her BP
is 70/40. She is very sleepy and barely responds to your
physical exam. She is mottled and her hands and feet are
cool. Her mom says she has not had a wet diaper in o ver
12 hours. She is clearly very ill and you are four hours from
the nearest pediatric centre. The last time you resuscitated a
critically ill child was two years ago.
For many physicians, this unsettling scenario is all
too familiar. The majority of ill and injured children in
Canada are treated not in tertiary care centres, but in
community emergency departments where the physicians
and nurses often have fewer resources and less experience
and training in treating severely ill children.
At its most recent meeting, the College presented its
Council Award to Dr. Sarah Reid, an expert in pediatric
emergency medicine, who has been working tirelessly to
ensure that health-care professionals in under-resourced
hospitals get the focused education they want and need
in order to care for acutely ill children who arrive at their
emergency departments.
Dr. Reid is a pediatrician in the emergency department
at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO).
She is also the medical lead for CHEO’s Emergency De-
partment Outreach Program, and an assistant professor
in pediatrics and emergency medicine at the University of
Ottawa.
As the founding medical lead for the outreach program,
Dr. Reid has been at the forefront of the creation and
implementation of the program which provides outreach
education to the 20 community hospitals within the
Champlain and the South East LHINs to facilitate broad
standardization of evidence-based care.
The program has, at its core, a multidisciplinary team
of physicians, nurses and a pharmacist. Team members
conduct an assessment to learn about a particular com-
munity hospital, its resources and educational require-
ments. The team then spends a full day at the hospital to
deliver an educational program specific to the identified
learning needs of the physicians, nurses and allied health
professionals in the emergency department.
Over its 10 years, and under the leadership of Dr. Reid,
the outreach program has grown to include a staff of 10
health educators, online resources, didactic teaching and
hands-on, high fidelity simulation of pediatric resuscita-
tion cases. The program is highly valued throughout
Eastern Ontario and has fostered strong partnerships
between CHEO and the community. Today, CHEO
is recognized within Canada as the pediatric academic
health centre with the most comprehensive emergency
department outreach program to community hospitals.
CHEO’s program has been a model for implementa-
tion of the work now being done at the national level
through TREKK – the Translating Emergency Knowl-
ISSUE 2, 2018 DIALOGUE
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