My name is Margaret Harvey, and I'm a trauma survivor. I was on my way to work
one day, and I was riding my bike, and the garbage truck came along and turned in
front of me, and knocked me down and ran over me on the back two sets of tires.
It was a major trauma.
[Ambulance sirens, gradually growing louder]
My pelvis was fractured.
There was a lot of internal bleeding as well as lacerations of my groin.
That was about three weeks, that I was here, and then I got moved to a rehab hospital.
So in total it was about four months. I had been in a
wheelchair, and I had graduated to a walker, so I was walking with a walker
but I thought that, that, that would not take long for me to get rid of and that
I would be fine. But the reality is I wasn't better and
things became much more challenging. I couldn't parent my children the same way.
I didn't have the same level of patience.
I didn't have the same energy. I didn't have the same physical capabilities,
and I didn't know if if it was something wrong with me that I wasn't better.
And I wanted to talk to someone else who had been through it.
I did find a trauma survivor network that was based out of the US, and I tried to find out if there
was anything like that in Canada, and there wasn't. And I had spoken to my
surgeon at St. Mike's, and he agreed that it was a great idea, and that he
would help me when the time was right.
>So my name is Amanda McFarlane, and I am the trauma registry manager
at St. Michael's Hospital. When Margaret came, she told a really compelling story about
her own injury, and where she thought that there was a gap in our care.
And it was easy for us to see that that gap was there.
She brought it to us, and we were just, yeah absolutely, we need to look at this.
The thought was that it would be just, we could just model it after the US,
because they had done all the work. But it turns out that it wasn't as simple as I thought it would be.
[Amanda]: I would gather together a team of experts. We had nurse practitioners. We had social
workers. We had program leads. We had managers of the departments. We had
physiotherapy. We had a psychiatrist. And most importantly we had two patient
advisors, Margaret and another patient advisor who joined us for that planning process.
>It's just to talk about them going over what she was like to care
taking because that's what happens as a patient ...
[Amanda]: I think that was one of the things that made the planning of the program quite unique.
They were instrumental in ensuring that we had a day session and a night session,
to accommodate the needs of trauma patients who don't necessarily
find it easy to get out of bed early in the morning.
[Margaret]: There's a lot of issues ...
[Amanda]: They also suggested that we try and find a place away from the clinical areas
to have the meetings, you know, just in case it was a trigger for them
if they had, you know, been in our hospital.
[Margaret]: On the radio, and did some newspaper articles, and that's how we initially got
the word out. I use social media a lot, Twitter.
[Amanda]: So welcome! And thanks for coming tonight.
And you've already sort of started while I've been puttering around,
doing what we're supposed to be doing here.
[Collette]:Most people who haven't experienced trauma in their life, they would say stuff like,
oh don't worry about it, it's nothing, move on, you know, yeah you'll get over it,
and they don't quite understand.
[Sarah Dunford]: In stone ages and famine that we've had. Our
bodies are programmed to want to hold on to our weight because it thinks that
that's what's needed to survive in the wild.
[Amanda]: We have expert speakers who come in for these meetings.
[Sarah]: To feel guilty or get down on yourself because you're not the
person you once were ...
[Amanda]: And they've been the ones who suggested speakers, they've
asked for someone to come and talk about pain management, and they were the ones
who asked for our dietitian to come.
[Margaret]: I think we would probably like to expand the program. We would like to meet more frequently.
[Frances]: What this program does, it's very comprehensive. It looks at multiple
areas of need, post-hospital. Post-hospital. So there is such a thing, it's
like, you know, and after, after life, after the hospital life. That's what it is.