Roxanne E. Kirsch MD, MBE, MD, FRCP(C), FAAP

Dr. Roxanne Kirsch joined The Hospital for Sick Children in 2016 in the Department of Critical Care Medicine, Division of Cardiac Critical Care, and in the Department of Bioethics.

Kirsch grew up in rural Saskatchewan and received her MD from the University of Saskatchewan in 2002. She completed a pediatric residency at the Alberta Children’s Hospital, Calgary and pediatric critical care training at Stollery Children’s Hospital, Edmonton. She undertook an additional fellowship in pediatric cardiac critical care in 2008 at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and in 2009 was appointed to staff at CHOP as a Cardiac Intensivist.

While at CHOP, Kirsch took on leadership roles for the Cardiac Simulation Team, the ECMO Operations Committee and the Critical Care Training Committee. She helped to develop a program of mock cardiac patient emergencies and ECMO simulations across the CHOP cardiac center. Additionally, she was Course Director for the CICU NP Airway Simulation course and for Cardiac NP Simulation education. She has ongoing interests in simulation as a tool for health-care providers to improve recognition and treatment of acute changes in patient clinical status as well as a tool for enhancing trainee education in bioethics and communication with families.

Kirsch is completing a masters degree in biomedical ethics with an additional certificate in ethics mediation at the University of Pennsylvania. She has been an annual instructor for the University of Pennsylvania bioethics and professionalism course for medical students since 2012. Her academic work focuses on the ethical and social challenges of stopping advanced technologic therapies like ECMO and ventricular assist devices, end of life care, and medical futility. Her interests include improving patient care delivery by enhancing health-care workers’ facility in understanding and dealing with the ethical issues intendant to pediatric critical care and cardiology.