April 14th, 2016
Yvonne Ying (EngSci 9T6) divides her time between two worlds: as the director of Surgical Foundations at the University of Ottawa and as a pediatric plastic surgeon at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario, and volunteering her surgical skills and services both home and abroad.“If you make a conscious effort to volunteer, it’s always a part of your practice,” said Ying about balancing her professional and volunteer commitments. “It becomes the norm. We’re in a privileged position to have the opportunity and the ability to volunteer — it’s our social responsibility.”
In 2015, Ying developed a surgical outreach clinic in downtown Ottawa that caters to a small percentage of the population — those without medical insurance, including refugees and new immigrants, and the homeless and marginalized patients who have difficulty accessing care in traditional settings. Ying said it’s a collaborative effort with one of the local community health clinics; if they receive a patient who needs surgery, but can not or will not seek treatment in the hospital, they refer them to the surgical outreach clinic.
Ying is building the clinic slowly. READ MORE