Our Partners

Royal College (Canada)

The Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada is the home of specialty care in Canada, setting the standards for postgraduate medical education, supporting the continuing professional development of 47,000 specialist physicians, surgeons and Resident Affiliates, and supporting health system innovations nationwide.

Our mission is to improve the health and care of Canadians by leading in medical education, professional standards, physician competence and continuous enhancement of the health system.

St. John Ambulance

St. John Ambulance is a charity and international humanitarian organization dedicated to helping Canadians improve their health, safety and quality of life.

As Canada’s standard for excellence in first aid and CPR services since 1883, St. John Ambulance offers innovative programs and products to save lives at work, home, and play. With over 1200 volunteers contributing over 240,000 hours of unpaid community service a year in BC and Yukon, through programs such as emergency and medical first response, youth programs, and therapy dog services, St. John Ambulance is an integral part of the community.

BCIRPU

BCIRPU serves as a provincial ‘hub’ to provide research-based leadership and coordination to stakeholders in order to reduce the societal and economic burden of injury among all age groups in BC.

Located at BC Children’s Hospital BCIRPU is a core research program within Evidence to Innovation, Child & Family Research Institute. BCIRPU also serves as a training centre, as several staff at the Unit hold faculty appointments at the University of British Columbia. BCIRPU was established as a strategic entity, blending the need for research and evidence with best practices and the development of policies and programs to reduce injury in BC.

Key objectives include:

• Reducing the burden of injury in BC.
• Leading research and knowledge development.
• Improving surveillance.
• Guiding evidence-based prevention.
• Supporting professionals and practitioners.
• Providing awareness, education and public information.

Susy Safe

Susy Safe is a surveillance registry for food and non-food foreign bodies insertion, inhalation, aspiration or ingestion (corresponding to the International Classification of Disease ICD-9 930-939). Currently it has collected over 25,000 cases.

The main aims of the Susy Safe registry are to:

• designate a risk-profile of products causing injuries (in order to develop a surveillance system identifying inappropriate product design or packaging, guarantee consumer safety by indicating hazardous products, provide comparative data on risk/benefits of hazardous products weighting acceptable risk versus the foreseen economic impact of recalling the product from the market);
• analyze how socio-economic disparities affect the risk of FB injuries;
• involve stakeholders in data collection and security surveillance.

Cases collected in the Susy Safe registry are anonymously reported from physicians, ORL experts, pneumologists.. using a standardized Web form. For every case, heterogeneous information is collected, regarding: children characteristics, injury circumstances, features of the foreign body, characteristics of the injury and hospitalization.

Parents, family members or child care workers who have observed a foreign body injury are invited to fill out the Foreign Body Injury Reporting Survey for Consumers (which takes a few minutes), enhancing the registry and taking a step forward the prevention of such injuries.

SafeFood4Children

Data from the Susy Safe registry have shown that food foreign bodies are those that cause injuries most ferquently. Particularly food bones, nuts and seeds, grains are those with the highest incidence (accounting for 32%, 22% and 21% respectively), but those that cause most severe injuries are meat, sweets and other food types sharing the same characteristics (consistency, shape, size). Additionally, about a half of injuries have occurred under adult supervision, showing lack of knowledge about hazardous food items.

The project consists on a series of short videos freely available on a dedicated website. In each video a specific topic regarding food choking injuries in children is addressed: epidemiology, children’s anatomy, obstruction’s mechanism and food preparation. Following the US and Canada guidelines for food preparation, videos provide basic information, explaining in a clear and as simple as possible manner how to prepare hazardous foods: with simple measures even the most dangerous foods can be safely consumed by children.

Each topic is presented by a field expert: a Professor of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, an ENT Doctor, a Pediatrician, a Researcher, a professional Chef de cuisine. Furthermore, people of different ethnic and social backgrounds (in many cases parents of young children) participated voluntarily to the realization of the videos. The videos are available in English, Italian, Spanish and Italian Sign Language and will be available in Portuguese, French, Arabic, Russian, Chinese and Japanese in order to reach as many people as possible.

YNOTFORTOTS

YNOTFORTOTS is a non-profit organization located in Vancouver, British Columbia with a goal to provide all children with the best opportunity to play, to learn and to grow. British Columbia has the highest child poverty rate in Canada, with 1 in 5 children considered statistically poor. Our aim is to have an impact in these children’s lives.

Our unique item registry and donation structure ensures all donated items go directly to the children who need it most. Schools and parents can request an item which we will add to our online item registry. Donors may browse the registry and contact us if they have items to donate. This way, all donated items will be directly delivered to the individual who submitted the request.

Selected schools can be part of our Special Projects Initiative in which we adopt a school and focus our fundraising goals to collect all items from their registry. If a school is in need of many items (athletic equipment, musical instruments, clothing, toys, children’s books or textbooks), they can contact us to be our special project. We will receive their request and get in contact with them. We will then post the school’s story on our special projects page and and item requests on our item registry page. We will focus our fundraising efforts on that school and advertise through various means to ensure that the items you requested for the school will be attained within their timeframe and delivered to their school!