Marissa Bonyun, MD, joins the team after completing two fellowships, the highest level of training a surgeon can obtain, in both joint replacement and lower extremity reconstruction and orthopaedic trauma.
UC Health’s Orthopaedics and Sports Medicine Chairman, Michael T. Archdeacon, MD, is exceptionally proud to have Bonyun join the team and bring her extensive training to Greater Cincinnati’s academic health system.
Serving as the referral center for the most complex cases, UC Health Orthopaedics and Sports Medicine pairs evidence-based research and patient preference to develop individualized treatment plans, specific to the population they serve.
In addition to Bonyun’s expertise, she brings diversity to a specialty that is traditionally underrepresented by females and minorities.
“Diversity, equity and inclusion are core values at both the University of Cincinnati and UC Health. Recruiting a diverse faculty in orthopaedic surgery has been a priority since I became chair,” said Archdeacon. “We have made and are continuing to make substantial progress in an effort towards representing our patient population.”
This team fits a need, as roughly 60% of our current orthopaedics patients are female, and females generally want females to care for them.
Archdeacon was able to successfully recruit Tonya Dixon, MD, foot and ankle subspecialist, who began practicing at UC Health in October 2017. Dixon is one of three female foot and ankle surgeons in Cincinnati and the only African-American female orthopaedic surgeon in the city.
In Bonyun’s new role at UC Health and as assistant professor of orthopaedic surgery at the UC College of Medicine, she will continue the research that she began in her most recent fellowship at the R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center, located in Baltimore, Maryland.
There, she was chosen as a recipient for an AO Trauma North American fellow research grant for her project, which is an educational checklist tool that she helped develop. CHECK-IN is a tool that was made to be used in the operating room, and to facilitate feedback to junior residents in the workplace and on the go as they learn to perform one of the basic orthopaedic trauma skills, an intramedullary nail for a fracture of the femur or tibia.
Previously, she was nominated to be a part of a team of educational leaders developing the Competency by Design Coaching Model, a national resource for medical schools and postgraduate programs across Canada.
These contributions are a testament to her current research focus – how to improve the resident learning experience within the operating room, and how surgeons can improve as educators.
“I intend to continue to explore this topic and resident education,” Bonyun said. “With hopes of helping us as surgeons become better teachers for our future generations of orthopaedic surgeons.”