Episode details:

Dr. Jennifer Quon is a pediatric neurosurgeon at the Hospital for Sick Children and an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto. She is also the Co-founder and Chief Medical Officer of Smartstep Surgical LLC. Dr. Quon completed medical school at Yale School of Medicine and neurosurgical training at Stanford Hospital. She did her pediatric neurosurgery fellowship at the Hospital for Sick Children prior to starting as faculty. Dr. Quon has broad clinical interests in pediatric neurosurgery, with expertise in skull base brain tumors, vascular disorders and fetal surgery. Her research program focuses machine learning applications in pediatric neurosurgery and neuroimaging, and surgical innovation.

In this episode Dr. Quon:

- Shares the challenges she faced using standing stools/steps in the operating room which in turn, inspired her ergonomics and innovation journey

- Discusses how she started her innovation journey by thinking about what features she would want an ideal step stool to have

- Explains that Surgistep is a motorized surgical stool/step which can adjust height in 1mm increments using a scissor-lift mechanism and allows surgeons the ability to make adjustments without asking other team members to stack steps https://www.smartstepsurgical.com/collections/surgistep

- Elaborates on the various steps during her innovation journey i.e. background research, finding a partner familiar with devices, meeting with engineers, raising funding, getting additional partners, making a prototype and learning legal and regulatory requirements

- Shares some of the frustrations during her innovator journey including the timelines being longer than anticipated and getting conflicting feedback to make engineering modifications

- Describes the basics of getting funding for aspiring surgeon-innovators

- Highlights that she is working on other safety products for the OR

You can reach Dr. Quon directly via email: jennifer.quon@sickkids.ca

Smart Step Surgical LLC is offering a 20% discount for listeners of the podcast which you can access here: https://www.smartstepsurgical.com/blogs/news/surgical-ergonomic-podcast-promotional-discount

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This episode of the podcast is sponsored by Q-optics. You can learn about them, the special rates they are offering for podcast listerners and schedule a demo via : https://q-optics.com/pages/surgicalergonomics-drlal

Disclosure:

Q-optics is a paid sponsor and the affiliate link above supports the podcast at no cost to you. It also provides you with a discount and a giveaway to listeners of the podcast, so we hope that it is a win-win!

Episode details:

Dr. Patricia Trbovich is an Associate Professor in the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation and cross appointed at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Toronto. She holds the Badeau Family Research Chair in Patient Safety and Quality Improvement at North York General Hospital. She is the Research and Scholarship lead, Centre for Quality Improvement & Patient Safety (C-QuIPS).

Patricia leads HumanEra, a team dedicated to enhancing healthcare safety and performance through human factors research. With over 15 years of experience, she's implemented health technologies and trained professionals worldwide. Now, she’s focused on advancing surgical safety through innovative tools such as the OR Black Box to identify safety threats to provider and patient safety, apply human factors principles to operationalize resilience, and prototype and test human factors informed interventions.

In this episode Dr. Trbovich:

- Shares her training background and how she arrived at her current role

- Defines cognitive ergonomics as a branch of Human Factors that focuses on how we design systems to support the way people think, the way they make decisions and how they manage information, especially under pressure

- Describes the consequences of not paying attention to workers' cognitive ergonomics in the OR, such as, creating conditions where they are overloaded and forced into task-switching (often mistaken for multi-tasking) which then increases the risk of errors

- Discusses her work where her team have identified the most interrupted time for anesthesiologists (i.e. emergence) and nurses (i.e. closing counts)

- Elaborates on the OR black box and other tools (surveys such as the NASA-Task Load Index, observations, objective measures of physiologic responses and behavior markers) that are used to study interruptions and understand work as it is done, and not as it is imagined

- Shares Black box data is useful to look at not only safety threats but also resilience supports and psychological safety.....

- Discusses strategies for preserving cognitive bandwidth of various team members in the OR e.g. calling out increasing cognitive load prior to it reaching a critical point, using checklists and other visual indicators and looking at how often staff are task-switching

You can learn more about the work references in this episode in these articles:

1) https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/15/10/e104713.long

2)https://journals.lww.com/annalsofsurgery/fulltext/2024/07000/using_the_operating_room_black_box_to_assess.13.aspx

You can reach Dr. Trbovich on Linked In

Follow us on LinkedIn, X, Instagram and Facebook and please reach out to us if you have any suggestions regarding episode ideas and guests or if you'd like to be a guest on the show

This episode of the podcast is sponsored by Q-optics. You can learn about them, the special rates they are offering for podcast listerners and schedule a demo via : https://q-optics.com/pages/surgicalergonomics-drlal

Disclosure:

Q-optics is a paid sponsor and the affiliate link above supports the podcast at no cost to you. It also provides you with a discount and a giveaway to listeners of the podcast, so we hope that it is a win-win!

Episode details:

Dr. Erin Sheffield is a board certified oral maxillofacial surgeon, speaker, educator, and advocate. Her passion is reshaping the culture of surgery by amplifying the voices of women and redefining what it means to thrive in this high demand profession. She is the founder of The Doctor Is ALL In (formerly known as Elevate Summit), a wellness and leadership retreat for women in Oral Maxillofacial Surgery, and co-host of The Resting Stitch Face Podcast, where she leads unfiltered conversations about the realities of life as a woman in surgery.
As a content creator, she is known for her openness and authenticity, inspiring the next generation of doctors and empowering patients to make more informed and empowered healthcare choices. She practices at Quincy Medical Group, a large multispecialty physicians group in Illinois. She previously served as assistant professor at the Univeristy of Iowa and currently serves on institutional committees for antiobiotic stewardship and ambulatory surgery.

In this episode of the podcast, Dr. Sheffield

- Shares how although dentistry training does a better job than surgical training reminding trainees about optimal postures during procedures, dentists have high rates of MSK injury

- Outlines how she tries to incorporate ergonomic best practices in her own practice and while training dental staff. These include adjusting the height of the chair, sitting during certain procedures, stretching in between cases to name a few

- Describes other strategies that she has adopted over the years, including investing in good overhead lights to avoid using headlights, only using loupes when absolutely needed and adjusting workflow to offload physical strain

- Expresses how working with a physical therapist was really helpful for overall physical health even though she initially sought them out for pelvic issues post-partum

- Discusses how smaller handed dentists (more likely to be women) often have issues handling dental instruments e.g. syringes used to inject local anesthetics

You can reach Dr. Sheffield on:

LinkedIn : https://www.linkedin.com/in/erin-sheffield-dds-9ab281339/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drerinsheffield/

Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@TheRestingStitchFacePodcast

Website: https://www.doctorisallin.com/

Follow us on LinkedIn, X, Instagram and Facebook and please reach out to us if you have any suggestions regarding episode ideas and guests or if you'd like to be a guest on the show