Dr. Charles Tator, Neurosurgeon

Dr. Charles Tator trained in Neurosurgery and Neuropathology and was Chair of Neurosurgery, at the

University of Toronto. He was chief of Neurosurgery at the Toronto Western Hospital, and was a founder of ThinkFirst, Canada, a national brain and spinal cord injury prevention foundation, and Parachute Canada, a national injury prevention agency. He held two research chairs at the University of Toronto, and is an Officer of the Order of Canada, and an inductee of the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame and the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame. Currently, he is a Scientist in the Krembil Brain Institute and Director of the Canadian Concussion Centre at Toronto Western Hospital. His book on Catastrophic Injuries in Sports and Recreation was published by the University of Toronto Press, and his Practice Primer on Concussions appeared in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. He is the author of 437 publications in peer review journals. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Neurotrauma and the Neuroscientist and is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Concussion.

The Importance of Recognizing, Treating and Preventing Concussions in our Children.

Concussions are important because there are so many of them, and they all don’t get better. We are fortunate in Ontario that the Ministries of Education, Health and Sports have come together to create PPM158 in 2014 and then Rowan’s Law in 2018 to reinforce to all Ontarians that they should know something about concussions to protect themselves and their children from the ravages of concussion. In schools, this means If we are informed about concussion we can recognize when a concussion has occurred, and we can institute early, informed treatment and we can prevent some concussions from happening and prevent others from progressing to long term suffering. You probably get the picture that concussion requires a multidisciplinary team and a coming together of people from schools, homes, and physicians’ offices to deal with this problem. I will be stressing teamwork in my discussion with parents and teachers at the Dr. Eric Jackman Institute of Child Study Laboratory School, at OISE, U of T.