When Dr. Daniel Grushka was completing a surgical rotation as a clinical clerk, he remembers seeing a quote of Mark Twain’s posted outside one of the operating rooms that stayed with him, “It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid, than to open it and remove all doubt.” While this may seem like common sense to many inexperienced and unsure medical students, he disagreed with the novelist’s advice, “I always opened my mouth and have encouraged all my students to do the same. We learn from talking through our clinical dilemmas and through our mistakes.”

Born and raised in Montreal, Dr. Grushka attended McGill University and obtained both a BSc. and MSc. in Microbiology and Immunology before moving to London and earning his MD from the Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry. When it came time to choose a specialty, he decided upon Family and Emergency Medicine because “it was intellectually stimulating, fairly all-encompassing and [allowed him] to experience a wide variety of medical problems and procedures while still developing strong relationships with patients both in the clinic and the ER department.”

Dr. Grushka completed his residency in the Department of Family Medicine and opted for an additional year of training in emergency medicine through the Department’s Enhanced Skills Program. He then became the Enhanced Skills Program Director at Western for 13 years and led the development of Enhanced Skills nationally for the College of Family Physicians of Canada (CFPC) as the national chair for 7 years. He is now the Postgraduate Director in the Department of Family Medicine at Western. Currently, he practices family medicine at the Victoria Family Medical Centre and Emergency Medicine at the Strathroy Middlesex General Hospital and the Alexandra Hospital in Ingersoll. In addition to his clinical responsibilities, he is a Deputy Registrar for the Medical College of Canada for their London site and is heavily engaged in teaching both by supervising residents and medical students for the Department of Family Medicine. Dr. Grushka is also very involved in numerous committees at Schulich and the CFPC.