“I am excited at being awarded the Physician Services Incorporated first Fellowship in Translational Health Research. This grant provides me with much-needed support to ensure my time is wholly dedicated to conducting research.
I am seeking to improve the outcomes of patients that have suffered anoxic brain injury. The Fellowship will greatly help me to continue along my chosen career path of becoming a successful Clinician Scientist and Translational Health Researcher.”
We are pleased to announce Dr. Damon Scales as the 2012 Physician Services Incorporated (PSI) Fellow in Translational Health Research. The goal of this prestigious Fellowship (valued at $150,000 per year for two years) is to guarantee protected research time for a new promising clinician. His field of interest is anoxic brain injury.
This unique Fellowship, one of the most valuable in Canada, is also supported by the University of Toronto’s Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre with matched funding.
The Fellowship will allow Dr. Scales to conduct a stepped-wedge cluster randomized controlled trial (RTC) to improve the application of evidence-based predictions about neurological prognosis for patients that have suffered from anoxic brain injury. This award will also allow Dr. Scales to dedicate time to his existing operating grants from the Canadian Institute of Health Research and Heart & Stroke Foundation of Canada.
Dr. Scales is a graduate of the University of Toronto (1997). Residencies earned Dr. Scales his Royal College Fellowship in Internal Medicine and Critical Care Medicine. He completed his PhD. in Clinical epidemiology and Health Care Research in 2007 at the University of Toronto.
Dr. Scales’ current professional appointments include: Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Toronto, Staff Intensivist at the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, Scientist at the Sunnybrook Research Institute, and Adjunct Scientist at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences. He is also the Program Director of the University of Toronto Adult Critical Care Medicine Residency program.
Dr. Scales’ translational health research seeks to improve outcomes for the critically ill. He has conducted and published several large cluster RCT of translational health research interventions, including the ‘ICU Clinical Best Practices Project’. This work seeks to improve six evidence bases care practices.
Dr. Scales also conducted a stepped-wedge cluster RCT to improve the use of therapeutic hypothermia in cardiac arrest survivors (The Strategies for Post Arrest Care trial, funded by CIHR and HSFC).
Papers Published on Foundation Funded Projects:
Association of prior β-blocker use and the outcomes of patients with out-of-hospital cardiac arrest
Economic evaluations in the diagnosis and management of traumatic brain injury: a systematic review and analysis of quality
Improving use of targeted temperature management after out-of-hospital cardiac arrest: a stepped wedge cluster randomized controlled trial
Trends in short- and long-term survival among out-of-hospital cardiac arrest patients alive at hospital arrival
A qualitative study of the variable effects of audit and feedback in the ICU
Maternal organ donation and acute injuries in surviving children
- J Crit Care. 2014 Dec;29(6):923-9
Association between arterial catheter use and hospital mortality in intensive care units
- JAMA Intern Med. 2014 Nov 1;174(11):1746-54
Organ donation after death in Ontario: a population-based cohort study
- CMAJ, 2013 May 14;185(8):E337-44
