Geriatric Emergency Medicine

Don

Dr. Don Melady continues his work with SREMI focused on
promoting excellent care of older ED patients in Mount Sinai’s own ED and on disseminating and implementing the concept of the older person-friendly ED, nationally and internationally. 
Under Dr. Melady’s direction, SREMI continues to host Canada’s only clinical fellowship in Geriatric Emergency Medicine. This past year SREMI welcomed two fellows. Dr. Ranjeev Kumar, from Singapore, was our first international fellow. As an experienced mid-career physician, his principal interest was in innovative models of care that have been developed at Sinai Health and in the Canadian system in general. 
Dr. Kira Gossack-Keenan from UBC was our Canadian fellow. During her fellowship year, she completed a Clinical Teaching Certificate diploma and did additional training in both Addiction Medicine (in the older population) and palliative medicine. She has returned to a staff position at Vancouver General Hospital and a faculty position at UBC. In the year, 2023-24, we are hosting a final year University of Toronto resident, Dr. Priyank Bhatnagar as the Geri EM fellow. SREMI now has eleven alumni of this fellowship program working in leadership positions in seven Canadian provinces and in Singapore.

Dr. Melady is active on the international stage. He continues as the chair of the Clinical Practice Committee at the International Federation of Emergency Medicine. This group brings together the leads of all the clinically relevant bodies in 45 national EM organizations. In that role, he supported the planning for the ICEM 2023 conference in Amsterdam; and is actively involved in planning the ICEM 2024 conference in Taiwan.
At the American grant-funded organization, The Geriatric ED Collaborative, he creates and hosts a widely attended bimonthly webinar series on various topics in geriatric ED care. He creates content and support for the group’s website https:// gedcollaborative.com.

 

team

He works with a team to disseminate and implement best practices in geriatric care in hospitals and health systems across the United States. He is on the Editorial Board of the nascent Journal of Geriatric Emergency Medicine which has developed a strategic plan that includes PubMed.
indexing by the end of 2024.

Award

Dr. Melady maintains a leadership role in the Geriatric EM committee of the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians (CAEP). The Education group within that committee has developed and presented a Clinical Geriatric EM course five times for Canadian emergency physicians. This year, the course was hosted by physician groups in northern Ontario and in Newfoundland. The group presented CAEP National Grand Rounds in January 2023 focussing on trauma management in older patients. Dr. Melady introduced a new format to the 2023 CAEP conference this year with the EM Learning Exposition, where over 450 conference participants interacted with clinical experts in “learning stalls” across the spectrum of emergency medicine.

At the 2023 CAEP conference, Dr. Melady received its highest award, the Lifetime Membership Award, which is given in recognition of “outstanding contributions and dedicated service to emergency medicine in Canada and CAEP. Individuals who receive this award are fixtures within the EM specialty.”