2013 Internship Projects

We were thrilled to have received 27 excellent and competitive proposals from surgical teams across the province of British Columbia.  In the end, we were able to award 8 studentships.  We favoured the applications that had both a multi-disciplinary team and action-oriented elements to their project (vs. collecting baseline/audit type nature).

Each of the awarded teams presented their summer studentship project outcomes at the 2013 SQAN Conference that took place on October 28/29. Please click here to view these posters and other resources from the Conference.

The successful awarded teams are:

Lead	Health Authority	Proposal
Dr. Kelly Mayson	Vancouver Coastal	Normothermia Initiative to Decrease Postoperative Complications in Non-cardiac Surgery at Vancouver General Hospital
Dr. Trina Montemurro	Providence Health Care	Improving the use of the Surgical Safety Checklist at St. Paul’s Hospital and Mt. St. Joseph’s Hospital
Dr. Andrew Wong	Fraser Health	Assessment of practices that are recognized to prevent the Incidence of Hospital Acquired Pneumonia (HAP) Post-operatively in Patients Experiencing Colorectal Surgery: Surrey Memorial Hospital
Dr. Ramesh Sahjpaul	Vancouver Coastal	Achieving Surgical Excellence at Lions Gate Hospital – How does our practice align with best-practice guidelines in reduction of surgical site infections?
Bryan Wilkinson	Fraser Health	Correlation between increase SSI rates to non compliance with clinical guidelines of anti-biotic dosage, timing, normothermia, and chlorhexidine (CHG) pre op washes (retrospective study): Delta, Langley and Abbotsford
Dr. Tom Wallace	Interior Health	Colorectal Surgical Site Infections Quality Improvement Initiative: Kamloops and Penticton Hospitals
Kim Ferguson	PHSA	Multidisciplinary strategy for the prevention of retained surgical items at BC Children’s Hospital
Catherine Kruger	Fraser Health	Scrub Busters: A Pilot to Reduce Surgical Site Infections Among Total Hip Surgery Replacement Patients at Surrey Memorial Hospital Through Presurgical Application of No-Rinse Chlorhexidine Washcloths (Surrey Memorial Hospital)

Each proposal received funding to support one studentship for an eight-week period during the summer of 2013.

As we complete our first annual summer studentship program, we would also like to celebrate our new collaboration with UBC Surgery and the Office of Pediatric Surgical Evaluation and Innovation.

The studentship was an extremely successful program. Please click here to view the evaluation results.