Building Strong NICU Families Symposium 2016

Conference Date & Time
Date: Thursday, November 3, 2016
Registration Time: 7:30 am
Time: 8:00 am to 4:00 pm

Conference Location
Mount Sinai Hospital
600 University Ave, Toronto, ON M5G 1X5
Room: Auditorium (18th Floor)

Directions and Parking
Please click HERE for details.

Schedule of Events
7:30 to 8:00 am: Registration

8:00 to 8:30 am: Opening Remarks by Dr. Shoo Lee
Topic: Life after the NICU

8:30 to 9:00 am: Welcome Message by Claire Kerr-Zlobin 

9:00 to 10:00 am: Keynote Speaker: Lesley Barreira
Topic: Hitch one’s wagon to a star: Exploring the untapped potential of behaviour science in supporting parents of preterm survivors.

10:00 to 10:15 am: Break

10:15 to 10:45 am: Speaker: Victoria DiGiovanni
Topic: Growing up Preemie

Speakers

Lesley Barreira, MADS, BCBA

Lesley is a Board Certified Behaviour Analyst (BCBA) who has worked in the fields of children’s mental health and paediatric developmental disabilities for over 10 years. She is very active in Ontario's behaviour analytic community and presently serves as an elected director at large on the Ontario Association for Behaviour Analysis (ONTABA) board. Lesley works in the Neonatal Follow-Up Clinic at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and she is the first behaviour analyst to be included as a member of an interdisciplinary team within the neonatal follow-up network in Canada. Lesley’s clinical interests include: behavioural paediatrics, parent-mediated interventions, toilet training, sleep training, and non-compliance.

Dr. Saroj Saigal

Dr. Saroj Saigal joined the pediatric faculty at McMaster University, Division of Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine, as a neonatologist in 1973, and was the Director of the Neonatal Follow-up Program for high-risk infants from 1973 -2013. She is currently Professor Emerita at McMaster, and continues to run the follow-up clinic as well as her ongoing research.

Dr. Saigal is the recipient of many awards from the Canadian Pediatric Society, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Society for Pediatric Research. She and her colleagues have followed one of the few population-based cohorts of extremely low birth weight infants longitudinally from infancy to adulthood and published extensively on the same. Dr Saigal is internationally recognized for her studies that focus on the quality of life and consequences of having been born extremely prematurely.

Recently, Dr. Saigal published a book for a general audience, “Preemie Voices,” a collection of letters that provide a description of life from the perspectives of adults who were born very prematurely (Friesen Press, November 2014). This is accompanied by a fascinating 25-minute documentary on the life of these preemies - www.preemievoicesbook.com

Dr. Julia Orkin

Dr. Orkin is a staff physician and the medical director of the Complex Care Program at the Hospital for Sick Children. She is an assistant Professor at the University of Toronto in the Department of Paediatrics. Her research interests focus on the intersection between health outcomes and poverty with a focus on child health; specifically children with medical complexity. She holds a Masters in Global Health from Oxford University and completed her Post-doctoral training at the Center for Research on Inner City Health, St Michael’s Hospital with a focus on neighbourhood outcomes on paediatric obesity.

She is an active member of the Community Paediatric Section at the Canadian Paediatric Society and is the lead medical director for the Provincial Council of Maternal and Child Health’s Complex Care Kids Ontario Strategy.