Tia Renouf, MD FCFP(EM)
Chair, Discipline of Emergency Medicine
Faculty of Medicine
Memorial University of Newfoundland
Dates of Visit: May 29 – June 2, 2017
Purpose of Visit
During this visit to CHES, Dr. Renouf will be meeting with individual members of the CHES community to discuss her research interests: (1) SPIRALS: clinical reasoning in the emergency department and (2) City Mouse and Country Mouse: a mixed methods evaluation of communication between rural GPs and urban specialists. Additionally, she will be learning the best qualitative approaches for her research.
Biography
After several years practicing in North America, Dr. Renouf developed a thirst to explore cultural and geographic influences on the practice of medicine. This led her to work on land and at sea, in many of the world’s remote, often austere and resource-challenged regions. She has worked with Canadian and Australian First Nations populations, in the latter instance with the Royal Flying Doctor Service of Australia. She has practiced on land in many other parts of the world (Haiti, the Middle East, New Zealand, and the North Pacific Micronesian islands), and at sea as expedition physician on ships travelling through polar latitudes in Antarctica, Greenland, and the Canadian Arctic. She was the ship’s doctor on a voyage to the wreck of the Titanic, and serves as an Emergency Response Unit (ERU) Delegate with the International Red Cross. Many years ago she volunteered with Kosovar refugees as they arrived in Canada.
Exposure to such resource – poor areas of the world stimulated her research interests in global medical education. With colleagues she uses inexpensive local material and simulation-augmented techniques to teach in rural and remote regions of the world. For example, she recently helped design and deliver a collaborative simulation-augmented educational curriculum in Cap Haitian, Haiti. At Memorial University of Newfoundland she co-chair’s the Tuckamore Simulation Scholarship and Research Collaborative (TSSRC). ASSET, our channel in the Cureus Journal of Medical Science, gathers our work under one roof, and provides a home for the community of practice Dr. Renouf is helping to develop at Memorial University. Memorial is a distributed medical school and as such has challenges not unlike Haiti’s, in providing high quality medical education.