Key research job renewed with $1.5M in funding
Four months ago, Donald Bickerdike came home from work and read the newspaper. He picked up his cellphone, and then blacked out.
When he awoke hours later, he had been through a new operation to remove a clot from his brain. Had this happened 20 years ago, he would likely have died or been permanently disabled, Dr. Michael Kelly says.
Kelly and his medical team performed an endovascular treatment, in which a tube is inserted through a stent in a leg artery, guided to the blockage in the brain and used to suck it out.
Kelly was part of a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine two years ago that proved its efficacy, and it’s now available to the public in Saskatchewan. He also helped develop the Saskatchewan Acute Stroke Pathway to streamline care for stroke patients.
Kelly’s position as Saskatchewan Research Chair in Clinical Stroke Research has been renewed. The Heart and Stroke Foundation, the Saskatchewan Health Research Foundation and the U of S College of Medicine committed $1.5 million over five years.
That funding is “fantastic,” Bickerdike said at a news conference on Tuesday.
“I think Dr. Kelly, the financing and everything behind him, has brought him to a point where he’s probably one of the most important doctors in Canada.”
When Kelly started his first term, he built a team to perform research and improve stroke care. Now he wants to move from an acute care focus to a comprehensive provincial strategy including prevention and rehabilitation, he said.
Bickerdike spent two weeks recovering at Royal University Hospital and another two at Saskatoon City Hospital, where staff helped him get his mind back up to speed. He went home, regained his driver’s licence a week later and today continues his recovery.
“It’s one of the most gratifying things you could ever imagine feeling, I think,” Kelly said of his patient’s progress.
“I feel super fortunate to have been involved with our team to do this kind of work.”