Many of our alumni volunteer with U of T Engineering. In celebration of National Engineering Month, we turn the spotlight on those that go the extra mile by volunteering in the greater community. From climbing one of the Seven Summits for charity to surgical education and research in Africa, our alumni are passionate about giving back. This story is the fourth of a five-part series.
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. She sees only a few new patients per month, but it’s not about the numbers — it’s about ensuring that these particularly vulnerable patients also have access to surgical care.
“It’s a small clinic but we have volunteers with various areas of surgical expertise,” she said. “I screen the consultation requests, and decide what type of surgeon we need. Then I find one who can see the patient in our clinic.”
When Ying is not volunteering her time at the clinic, she participates in numerous surgical education and service projects in Africa.
For more than five years she has been a volunteer surgeon with Operation Smile — an international children’s medical charity that provides free life-changing surgeries for children with cleft lip, cleft palate and other facial deformities. She also travels to Uganda each winter to work with a local surgeon and teach new trainees. And from 2008–2011, she was involved in the development and mentorship for a new surgical training program in Guyana.
“I’ve always been interested in international health and it’s one of the things that drew me into medicine,” she said. “I didn’t actually plan to go into surgery but I was always interested in international health.”
Because of the sustainable changes with community capacity building in Guyana, the results of Ying’s efforts there have been especially rewarding.
“It was great to see that after three years they graduated a few cohorts of surgeons,” she said. “Some of them have gone on to seek some extra training but most have stayed in the community — Guyana is not a very big country, which makes it easier to have an big impact. There has been a sustainable change in their ability to provide surgical care in the country.”
Looking to volunteer at U of T Engineering? There are many rewarding student-focused, Faculty-level and University-wide volunteer opportunities for alumni. Make a connection, share your experiences and inspire the next generation of engineers today.
