Apr 6, 2020

#SCBIpodcast: A candid COVID conversation with Dr. Ruby Alvi

About DFCM

This week on Small Changes, Big Impact, we have Dr. Ruby Alvi, the undergraduate site director at Trillium Health Partners - Mississauga site, and the University of Toronto Department of Family and Community Medicine's pre-clerkship director. Today, we're having a candid COVID conversation.

Transcript:

Dr. Rezmovitz: (00:18)
And again, we're doing this through Zoom. Ruby, why don't you tell us some of the roles that you play in the department.

Dr. Alvi: (00:26)
All right - thanks Jeremy for having me here today. I am an undergraduate site director at the Trillium Health Partners Mississauga site. And I'm also the DFCM's pre-clerkship director.

Dr. Rezmovitz: (00:40)
And which site do you work at? Like where is your office?

Dr. Alvi: (00:43)
The Mississauga. So it's one of the expansion sites - Trillium Health Partners - the Mississauga Hospital, specifically, at the teaching unit.

Dr. Rezmovitz: (00:50)
And so, being in Mississauga, I assume that none of this COVID-19 has impacted you yet?

Dr. Alvi: (00:56)
No, not at all. I don't think COVID-19 is a Toronto problem. It's - I don't know if you heard, but it's kind of a provincial, national, international. It's a pandemic.

Dr. Rezmovitz: (01:09)
Oh, okay, good. Thanks for updating me on that. Yeah. So how are you coping?

Dr. Alvi: (01:15)
Coping? It's - you know what - almost - I hate to say this, but almost overnight our world has changed hasn't it. I would say March 18th was the magic day for me when everything changed. I was supposed to be off for March break, but obviously like everybody else, travel plans had to be reassessed and changed, so I stayed home. My son didn't - my son went on a trip to Peru with a bunch of classmates from medical school and that kept us quite busy on March 17th, as borders [inaudible] international [inaudible] the borders were closing down and people were scrambling to get home. But we stayed home. We were supposed to go to Dubai and Cairo just ahead of the cases in Cairo. So when big changes had to happen at our clinics, I was at home and I was able to actually take that time to do some of the work that was needed to shift our practice to really a virtual practice. Like, I can't even imagine how the people who were seeing patients at the same time were able to make that adjustment on the fly. There were some of us who weren't scheduled to see patients [inaudible] that we're really able to investigate - do what they needed to do to help the people that were already working, get our offices ready for the big changes that came the week after.