Christopher Hicks is an emergency physician and trauma team leader at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, and Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Toronto. He is a clinician educator and education research scientist at the Li Ka Shing Knowledge institute, and appointee to the International Centre for Surgical Safety, with a program of research that focuses on simulation-based psychological skills training, human factors and clinical logistics. To that end, he has studied all sorts of peculiar stuff, from mental practice to stress inoculation training, in an effort to help make teams safer and more effective. In 2018, Chris co-created and chaired resusTO, a unique resuscitation-focused simulation conference in Toronto. Chris’ clinical interests include trauma resuscitation, emergency cardiology, and getting things done in the resus room. Chris is an avid speaker and lecturer, staunch #FOAMed supporter, occasional runner, semi-retired pianist, and proud father of three lunatic boys.

Teams/Research

Team based skills are not innate, but rather need to be developed by way of deliberate practice in order to turn a team of experts into an expert team. My program of research focuses on novel ways to improve team performance during critical events in emergency medicine and trauma. Our research team has examined the role of mental practice for complex trauma resuscitations, stress inoculation training as a means to modify one’s own at times maladaptive acute stress response during a critical event, and domain-specific crisis resource management training to standardize communication for inter-professional teams.

Our current work involves human factors engineers to help examine the nature of team and task-based processes in trauma resuscitation, scrutinizing team-based non-technical skills and design ergonomics to improve care for critically injured patients.

I am an emergency physician and trauma team leader at St. Michael’s Hospital, as well as a Clinician-Educator in the Department of Medicine at the University of Toronto. I use high fidelity human patient simulation to help make teams work better and more safely.

“We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
–T.S. Eliot

“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak”
–Hans Hofmann