BestBits.ca : an online journal club for pediatric hemato-oncology - an initiative from SickKids fellows in Toronto

Hi readers! This is Sarah here. As you might remember, I am a French pediatric oncologist and I arrived in Toronto for a fellowship a couple of months ago.

I recently found out about an excellent initiative led by three SickKids fellows called BestBits.ca: Dr. Natasha Alexander, Dr. Jack Brzezinski and Dr. Nicolas Waespe. BestBits works both as a journal review and a virtual journal club that you can virtually access from anywhere.

As you will read on the website, their project started in 2015 when they realized the struggles of pediatric hematologists/oncologists with keeping themselves up to date in a busy clinical and research environment alike. The wide array of research efforts worldwide and thus increasing volume of the literature in a multitude of different journals render it difficult to screen them on a regular basis. On top of that, there is a dispersion of articles covering information relevant to pediatric patients in a multitude of journals covering adult and pediatric literature alike. Back then, they couldn’t find a good compilation of the relevant articles anywhere to facilitate screening the current literature to keep us up to date. Therefore, they decided to start a magazine with summaries of pertinent literature on a bi-monthly basis with the help of fellows from SickKids.

They included roughly twenty journals covering haem/onc and asked the fellows to write short summaries of the articles relevant to pediatric topics including a conclusion putting the novel findings in the context of current knowledge. 

After successful compilation of five issues in 2015-2016, they realized that this project gathered a lot of attention and was well received. They therefore applied to the Garron Family Cancer Centre Fund for Innovative Projects and used the money granted to build the website with the intent of dispersing the initiative to a wider audience.  Twelve issues have been issued so far.

Registration is currently open to physicians and other healthcare professionals with an interest in pediatric haem/onc internationally!  You can tailor your registration preferences to receive bimonthly updates, be a journal reviewer and/or virtual journal club participant.  

You can find also find BestBits on YouTube and Twitter.