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#IWD2019: Medicine and its gender gap

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I am the 6th female president at the OMA. In 2018, we had 10 female Directors out of 26 on the OMA Board, the most we’ve ever had. In 2018, we had 81 female Council Delegates out of 218, again the most we’ve ever had. Across the profession, more and more women are entering medicine. In 1968, women made up 7% of the medical profession; nearly 50 years later, that number is 39%. Looking at the youngest generation of physicians, women now outnumber men….

We have to ask why a gender gap exists to understand how to fix it.

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Is this it? The Premier's Council's First Report and health transformation

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Ontario’s health care system needs an overhaul — so says everyone who’s waited hours in their local Emergency Department or waited months to see a specialist or who can’t find a family doctor.

On January 31, the Premier’s Council on Improving Health Care and Ending Hallway Medicine released its first report. The snapshot it gave of the healthcare system was alarming.

#BellLetsTalk: Depression

By the age of 40, 1 in 2 Canadians will have or have had a mental illness. Depression is the most common.

I have treated patients with depression, both young and old who are successful men and women. I see how hard it is for them to talk about it. How hard it was for them to get help. The well-meaning folks who struggled to understand, telling them to “snap out of it.” Or “get over it.” Or “you have every reason to be happy.”

Here’s the thing: depression isn’t the same as sadness.

iGen: Connected yet so very disconnected

Teens today are constantly plugged in and turned on for 6-10 hours a day on their smartphones, checking them hundreds to thousands of times a day. Most can’t go to sleep without it within arm’s reach.

It’s an addiction.

Teens today live two lives: the physical one seen in school and at home, and the virtual one on SnapChat and Instagram. This virtual life has transformed the teenage brain, and not for the better.

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Three days, four planes, thousands of kilometres: Up in the First Nations Reserves of Northern Ontario

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It took Kirsten Hudak and I most of a day and three planes to fly out to northern Ontario’s First Nations communities: Toronto to Thunder Bay to Sioux Lookout to Keewaywin and North Caribou Lake First Nations reserves. Roughly the same amount of time it takes to fly across the country from Toronto, ON to Vancouver, BC.

None of it prepared me for what I witnessed. Life is hard up here, hard in ways that it simply shouldn’t be.

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Life and death in Northwestern Ontario

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A newborn baby died 2 weeks ago in Northwestern Ontario — a rare event in a first-world healthcare system.

A woman, pregnant and bleeding, needed emergency surgery. The situation was so dire that her baby died on the way to the hospital. The clock on her life was ticking. The city's one and only anesthetist was away. Frantic calls were made until a Doctor came out of retirement to save her life -- but not her newborn baby.

The exact location of this tragedy doesn't matter -- Fort Frances, Dryden, Sioux Lookout, Red Lake, Kenora, Atikokan, certainly any First Nations reserve. All of Northwestern Ontario has been under-serviced for years.