Fellows

Chandan Bal is a Pediatric Hospital Medicine physician at the Alberta Children’s Hospital and an Assistant Professor at the University of Calgary (U of C). She obtained her medical degree at the U of C in 2018 and completed pediatric residency at the University of Toronto (U of T) in 2022. She subsequently pursued a fellowship in Academic General Pediatrics at The Hospital for Sick Children. Chandan earned a Master’s degree in Quality Improvement and Patient Safety from the Institute of Health Policy, Management, and Evaluation (IHPME) at the U of T in 2023. Her academic interests focus on using QI methodology to provide high-value care to hospitalized children and resource stewardship.

Elaine Bland is a family doctor in Calgary, AB.  She completed her family medicine training in the UK before relocating to Alberta. She has a master’s in aviation medicine. She spent the last 24 years practicing comprehensive family medicine in rural & urban settings and is now focusing on her palliative care practice and primary care system leadership.  Elaine continues to practice in primary care at the Primary Care Network extended access clinic. Her current leadership roles include hospice medical director and medical lead at Calgary Foothills Primary Care Network in the Mental Health portfolio. Through the fellowship she hopes to develop a framework to embed Choosing Wisely based quality improvement in primary care networks involving multidisciplinary team and patient partners, focusing on what matters to patients, reducing unnecessary testing & deprescribing.

Mikha Alegria is a Quality Improvement Specialist for the Sprott Centre for Quality and Safety at the University Health Network (UHN). With over 12 years of experience as a registered nurse in diverse clinical and leadership roles, Mikha has honed her expertise in patient-centred care and healthcare improvement. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Nursing from Toronto Metropolitan University and a Master of Science in Healthcare Quality from Queen’s University.

Mikha leads transformative projects at UHN, including optimizing transfusion practices and reducing postoperative pneumonia rates in all phases of care. Her work is driven by data and evidence-based practices that align with strategic healthcare priorities. Passionate about patient safety and systemic change, Mikha’s current focus is on expanding patient blood management initiatives within the perioperative department and critical care, which aligns with Choosing Wisely Canada’s best practices. Her efforts continue to advance healthcare quality and safety at UHN.

Valerie Leung is the Antimicrobial Stewardship Program Lead at Public Health Ontario where she works with a multidisciplinary team and external partners to advance antimicrobial stewardship across the healthcare system and in the community. She is also a Clinical Pharmacist at Michael Garron Hospital, Toronto East Health Network where she is involved in local quality improvement initiatives.

Wendy Kingsburgh is a registered Social Worker with a Masters degree in Social Work and has been at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre for over 2 decades, primarily working in General Internal Medicine.  Her quality improvement journey began with the PBRI TASHNp Fellowship in 2017, followed by the CQuIPS certificate course in 2018 and then she graduated from the Institute of Health, Policy, Management and Evaluation MSc in Quality Improvement and Patient Safety in 2020.  She currently works as a Performance Improve Specialist with the Quality, Patient Safety & Enterprise Risk department at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre.  Wendy brings a unique lens to her role by having a solid knowledge of the social determinants of health combined with systemic and equity issues.  She is excited about her Healthcare Improvement Fellowship project: Language Concordant Care: Improving access to care in patient’s preferred language.

Beatriz Moschiar Almeida is a vascular surgeon from Brazil finishing a Limb Preservation fellowship at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Center. She is passionate about providing equitable access to healthcare for all patients and appropriate care to prevent major amputations. Her research focuses on enhancing current surgical pathways for vascular procedures and examining healthcare utilization and demographic characteristics of dysvascular amputees. In 2024, she completed the CQuIPS Certificate course and is eager to advance her Quality Improvement research skills as a CQuIPS fellow this year.

Vanessa Wright is a nurse practitioner at Women’s College Hospital and emerging health systems researcher. Through her decade long work in newcomer health at the Crossroads Refugee Clinic, Vanessa has developed and implemented innovative models of primary care between hospital, community, and social services to support those navigating the refugee process. Vanessa’s professional experience includes working across primary, acute, and public health care domains, as well as facilitating teams in medical outreach and education both locally and globally. Vanessa is a subject matter expert for CAMH’s Immigrant and Refugee Mental Health Course and professional practice and nursing faculty lead for the University of Toronto’s TAAAC (Toronto Addis Ababa Academic Collaboration). Vanessa’s research interests lie in community engagement, interprofessional collaboration, learning health systems and integration. She received her Doctor of Nursing from the Lawrence S. Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing, and her thesis explored the relationship between cross-sector integrated care and organizational learning

Tahara Bhate is a staff emergency physician with University Health Network (UHN). Completing her residency training at the Cumming School of Medicine at the University of Calgary, she holds a Masters in Clinical Epidemiology from the University of British Columbia, where she also completed her medical undergraduate studies.

From a clinical research background, her interest in patient safety and systems improvement evolved from efforts to use simulation-based interventions to improve outcomes during Rapid Response Team activations. Supported by a Helios Fellowship from the University of Calgary, she completed the Excellence in Quality Improvement (EQUIP) certificate program from CQuiPS in 2020, and has gone on to develop an academic interest in incorporating novel methodologies such as Human Factors analyses and Simulation into traditional QI frameworks, most recently using simulation to address the issue of patient flow efficiency in the emergency department. Her fellowship will focus on developing methodological tools to support robust evaluation of innovative system interventions.

Carla Rosario is an early-career Geriatrician working at Baycrest Health Sciences. Her passion is to provide meaningful and comprehensive care for older adults. Dr. Rosario’s research interest is to explore new models of care, especially in long term care settings. Carla has completed the CQuIPS Certificate course in 2022 and is looking forward to furthering her QI research skills and learning from everyone this year as a Healthcare Improvement Fellow.

Sonia Rodriguez-Ramirez is transplant nephrologist based at University Health Network, originally from Mexico. She is Master of Science in Healthcare Quality Candidate at Queen’s University. Sonia has also finished the Advanced Training Program in Clinical Quality Improvement by Intermountain Healthcare Delivery Institute in November 2022. Her hope to become a successful Transplant Clinician in Quality Improvement. Sonia’s QI interests include high-value care, novel models of inpatient care and transitions of care, qualitative research, and emotional intelligence for organizations. She believes QI’s mission is about serving exponentially, beyond our human limits, by designing valuable healthcare systems to impact our community.

Dana Mayer received her medical degree from the University of Ottawa and completed her residency in Family Medicine at the University of Toronto. She then completed a one-year fellowship in Hospitalist Medicine at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. She practices Hospitalist Medicine at Sunnybrook as well as outpatient Family Medicine, with a focus on care of the elderly and palliative care. Dr. Mayer is a graduate of the Excellence in Quality Improvement Certificate Program. Her quality improvement and research work has focused on transitions in care and direct admissions to an acute care medical ward for patients from long-term care facilities. Dana has been involved in teaching residents in the community and academic family medicine clinics.

Certina Ho is a graduate of the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Toronto. She obtained her graduate degrees in Library and Information Science and in Education from the University of Toronto. She completed her PhD dissertation at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto (OISE/UT) and holds faculty appointment at the Department of Psychiatry and the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Toronto; School of Pharmacy, University of Waterloo; and the Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine, McMaster University, with a focus on educational program evaluation and scholarship, development of patient/medication safety and quality improvement curriculum, respectively. Dr. Ho also retains her affiliation with the Institute for Safe Medication Practices Canada as a Medication Safety Advisor, with a focus on community pharmacy reporting and learning.

Mathilde Gaudreau-Simard is a General Internist at The Ottawa Hospital. She earned her medical degree from McGill University after completing a law degree at the University of Montreal. Most recently, she completed a master’s in health administration at the University of Toronto. Dr. Gaudreau Simard’s quality improvement work revolves around two themes – point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) and planetary health. As it pertains to POCUS, she is currently working on increasing the uptake of this technology to streamline care processes and to identify the most efficient approaches to address diagnostic needs. In regards to planetary health, she is building awareness on the carbon footprint of current care pathways and is leveraging quality improvement science to reduce the waste associated with inpatient care.

Joey Cheng-Singleton is the MRI Team Lead at the Hospital for Sick Children which allows her to advocate for her profession as a radiological technologist as well as make a difference via quality improvement and patient safety initiatives within and beyond Diagnostic Imaging. Joey is currently completing a Master’s in Quality Improvement and Patient Safety at University of Toronto. Her passion lies in improving overall patient experience and outcomes through improving accessibility to DI services with a focus on equitable, diverse, and inclusive needs of patients.

Thomas Bodley is an internal medicine and critical care physician at the Scarborough Health Network (SHN) in Scarborough, Ontario. He is finishing his MSc in Clinical Epidemiology at the University of Toronto which focuses on development and validation of quality indicators for ICU team performance. Dr. Bodley has industry experience in Process Engineering which he has applied to quality improvement, patient safety, and resource stewardship initiatives throughout his training and career. Through the CQuIPS Choosing Wisely fellowship, Thomas hopes to build capacity for healthcare sustainability initiatives in critical care across Canada.

Marko Balan is an intensivist and internist practicing in St. John’s, NL. He completed his core internal medicine residency and critical care fellowship at Dalhousie University along with a critical care ultrasound fellowship at Western University. In 2019 he completed the Excellence in Quality Improvement Certificate Program (EQUIP) of the Centre for Quality Improvement and Patient Safety (University of Toronto) and is currently pursuing a Master of Science in Healthcare Quality degree at Queens University. Dr. Balan’s clinical and healthcare quality interests include reducing low-value care within intensive care units, and medical education and quality assurance in point-of-care ultrasound.

Maha Al Mandhari is currently in fellowship training for Cardiovascular Anesthesiology at Toronto General Hospital. She completed her undergraduate medicine studies at the University of St Andrews and the University of Manchester in the UK. Dr. Maha Al Mandhari graduated from the Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine and Adult Critical Care residency programs at the University of Toronto while simultaneously earning a Master’s in Quality Improvement and Patient Safety through the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation at the same university. She is passionate about database utilization for quality improvement research in critical care and cardiac anesthesia.

Jennifer Wong is a clinical speech-language pathologist (SLP) and the professional leader for speech-language pathology at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. She carries academic appointments through the University of Toronto’s Department of Speech-Language Pathology, The Institute for Education Research at UHN, and Sunnybrook’s Practice-Based Research & Innovation (PBRI) Program and Education Research Unit. Jennifer’s clinical practice is in long-term care/palliative care, where she focuses on dysphagia and communication for older adults with complex medical needs.

Jennifer is a graduate of the C-QuIPS certificate course, and has also completed an Innovation Fellowship through Sunnybrook’s PBRI program/the Toronto Academic Health Sciences Network. Jennifer’s quality improvement and research work has focused on the impact of dysphagia on safety/quality of life, and end-of-life care in interprofessional settings. Jennifer is involved in teaching and professional development activities for SLPs, and advocacy/leadership work with her provincial and national associations in the area of palliative care.

Sam Vaillancourt is an emergency physician and trauma team leader at St. Michael’s, Unity Health Toronto. He is the director of quality improvement for the Department of Emergency Medicine at St. Michael’s. His research interest focuses on defining and measuring outcomes that matter to patients and the use of design methodology in improvement. As an associate scientist at the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute, he led a team to develop the first patient-reported outcome measure for patients receiving care in the emergency department (PROM-ED.org). He completed training in health policy and management at the Harvard School of Public Health and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. He is co-director of the quality improvement training program for the Division of Emergency Medicine at the University of Toronto and serves on the patient safety council at Unity Health Toronto.

Katrina Piggott received her medical degree from the University of Toronto. She completed her residency in internal medicine at McMaster University and subspecialty training in Geriatric Medicine at the University of Toronto. She practices inpatient and outpatient geriatric medicine based at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre.

Katrina pursued a Masters in Quality Improvement and Patient Safety at the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation (IHPME) at the University of Toronto. She now teaches in the IHPME masters program, and is the co-director for the Division of Geriatric Medicine Co-Learning Quality Improvement Training Program. Her scholarly work aims to improve care for older adults living in long-term care homes and living in the community, and improving care practices that create harm and waste in the healthcare system.  Her clinical interests include drug safety for older adults, delirium prevention, and improvement of safety and the older adult experience while admitted to hospital.

Ashraf Kharrat is a staff neonatologist at Mount Sinai Hospital, where she began her career in the clinician-scientist development program, and assistant professor in paediatrics at the University of Toronto. She completed her medical degree at the University of Alberta, paediatric training at the University of Ottawa, and her neonatal-perinatal fellowship and targeted neonatal echocardiography training at UofT. She graduated with a Master of Science in Healthcare Quality from Queen’s University.

Ashraf has an interest in neonatal sepsis and is conducting both quality improvement work and clinical research in neonatal sepsis and sepsis hemodynamics. She has a passion for data-driven quality improvement and is currently leading a large unit-wide QI program aimed at decreasing nosocomial infection in the neonatal intensive care unit and improving the management of infants diagnosed with septic shock. She is also involved in QI initiatives to standardize the management of hypotension among critically ill infants.

Beth Gamulka is a hospital-based paediatrician who has spent her career splitting her clinical responsibilities between tertiary and community hospitals in the GTA. Currently, she is a staff physician at SickKids in the Divisions of Paediatric Medicine and Emergency Medicine as well as at North York General Hospital in the Department of Paediatrics. After completing the C-QuIPS Excellence in Quality Improvement Certificate Program (EQUIP) in 2019, Beth became an active participant in the Sepsis Program at SickKids and the clinical coordination, management and investigation of children with Multi-system Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C). She also joined the faculty of the Co-Learning Curriculum in QI Program for fellows and is one of the faculty members providing QI education for core paediatric trainees. Given her perspective working in both the academic inpatient and emergency settings as well as in community hospitals, Beth has a particular interest in improving transitions of care between tertiary and community settings. Her main QI focus for the C-QUIPS Improvement Fellowship will be on QI implementation of a new EMR-based sepsis recognition tool on the inpatient paediatric medicine units at SickKids.

Natasha Gakhal is a general rheumatologist at Women’s College Hospital and assistant professor in the Division of Rheumatology at the University of Toronto as a clinician in quality and innovation. She completed her Master’s in Quality Improvement and Patient Safety from IHPME at UofT. Her academic focus is in improving access and triage to rheumatology care and improving collaboration with primary care and subspeciality providers. She also co-leads a juvenile arthritis clinic with paediatric rheumatology to improve care for young adults transitioning from paediatric care.

Allison Brown is an assistant professor in the Department of Medicine and Department of Community Health Sciences in the Cumming School of Medicine at the University of Calgary. She completed a Master of Science in Health Research Methods (McMaster University) and a PhD in Community Health Sciences (University of Calgary).

Allison has more than eight years of quality improvement and patient safety experience, including in the clinical and academic contexts. To date, she has taught more than 1,000 medical learners about quality improvement, including annually as a visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons in Ireland. Her passion for teaching quality improvement to others has inspired much of her research, including her doctoral thesis which included a realist synthesis of the contexts and mechanisms associated with quality improvement curricular outcomes and a comparative analysis of pedagogical strategies at the postgraduate level. She has published her work in BMJ Quality and Safety, Perspectives on Medical Education, BMJ Open Quality, Teaching & Learning in Medicine and Medical Education. Allison’s current program of research continues to explore how best to teach quality improvement in medical education, with a particular focus on teaching and assessment strategies as part of competency-based models of training.

Genevieve Bouchard-Fortier is a graduate of McGill University. While completing a residency program inthe Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the University of Toronto, Genevieve obtained aMaster of Clinical Epidemiology focusing on cancer screening and cancer prevention at the HarvardSchool of Public Health. She completed her fellowship in gynecologic oncology at UofT, working at thesame time on understanding and improving the outcomes of minimally invasive surgeries forgynecologic oncology patients. More recently, she completed the C-QuIPS certificate course.Genevieve’s research and clinical interests include management of gestational trophoblastic disease aswell as development of quality metrics to improve gynecologic oncology care.Genevieve is a joint C-QuIPS-Choosing Wisely Canada Fellow.

Seychelle Yohanna is an assistant professor in the Department of Medicine at McMaster University and a transplant nephrologist at St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton. She completed a Master of Science in Quality Improvement and Patient Safety (University of Toronto). Her academic focus is improving access to kidney transplantation and living kidney donation for patients in Ontario with chronic kidney disease. She has a particular interest in removing system barriers to living kidney donation and leads the Hamilton One-Day Living Kidney Donor Assessment Clinic. Seychelle also leads the implementation of patient safety rounds across all clinical programs at McMaster, is heavily involved in teaching QIPS to medical trainees, participates in several hospital QIPS committees, and supervises several QIPS research projects at her institution.

William Silverstein completed his medical school and Internal Medicine training at the University of Toronto, where he also served as Chief Medical Resident at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. He has completed a Master of Science with a concentration in Quality Improvement and Patient Safety at the University of Toronto, and an Editorial Fellowship at JAMA Internal Medicine for their Teachable Moments Series. He is currently completing a Fellowship in General Internal Medicine at University of Toronto.  His academic interests lie at the intersection of quality improvement, patient safety, resource stewardship, and health services research.

Holly Rector, DNP, RN-EC, AGACNP-BC, A-GNP

Holly Rector graduated from the University of Virginia with her Master of Science in Nursing and Doctor of Nursing Practice degrees. During her doctorate, she was also an Interprofessional Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Scholar which provided her with additional training in interprofessional collaboration and quality improvement methodology. Her dissertation focused on enhancing patient engagement for individuals hospitalized with acute myocardial infarction.

Holly currently practices as an Adult Nurse Practitioner in Cardiology at Women’s College Hospital (WCH) and is appointed as Adjunct Faculty at Lawrence S. Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing. In her current role, Holly’s quality improvement and research interests are focused on program evaluation of a discharge heart failure clinic and virtual coronary artery disease clinic. She is also interested in evaluating of the patient experience and enhancing patient engagement.   In addition to her clinic work, she regularly volunteers as an Interprofessional Education Facilitator for the University of Toronto healthcare disciplines and is involved in the Quality Improvement Research Committee at WCH.

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Erica Patterson is a Clinical Nurse Specialist for Interprofessional Practice.  In this role, she leads multiple hospital wide programs and projects including the Sepsis program and SickKid’s Comfort promise initiative. She has a Bachelor of Science of Nursing from McMaster University and a Masters of Nursing- Leadership in Health Policy and Education from Ryerson University.  Erica also works part time as a RN on the Bone Marrow Transplant unit where she cares for pediatric oncology and hematology patients admitted to hospital. Erica also holds an adjunct lecturer position with the Faculty of Nursing at the University of Toronto.

Preetika Muthukrishnan is an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Vermont, Larner College of Medicine and an academic hospitalist at the affiliated University of Vermont Medical Center. In addition to her clinical practice, Preetika holds a number of teaching and administrative appointments. She is co-faculty of the Internal Medicine Resident Quality Improvement Curriculum, where she mentors second year residents in the implementation of a QI project using active learning techniques. She leads the division of hospital medicine’s QI  efforts across the institution. She is also the medical director of the hospital-wide emergency response teams; she works with a multidisciplinary team to oversee daily operations, identify gaps in quality metrics and implement solutions. She is also co-director of the Internal Medicine Resident Mock Code Curriculum.