Fellows

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.

Dana 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.

Andrea Hatherell is a clinical Speech-Language Pathologist (SLP) and is also currently in the role of Senior Quality and Process Improvement Specialist at Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital. She is the Clinical Education Liaison at Holland Bloorview and has status appointment at the University of Toronto’s Department of Speech-Language Pathology. Andrea is a graduate of the Masters of Science in Quality Improvement and Patient Safety program at the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation at the University of Toronto. Andrea is passionate about developing efficient and effective interprofessional processes to increase access to pediatric rehabilitation services. She is interested in change management and engaging interprofessional teams of clinicians to build quality improvement and safety knowledge to build sustainability in improvement work.  Andrea is also interested in developing her quality improvement teaching and education abilities to represent and share the pediatric rehabilitation quality and safety lens.

Katie Gardner is a pediatric emergency physician at IWK Health in Halifax and an assistant professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Dalhousie University. She serves as the Director of Quality and Patient Safety for the division of pediatric emergency medicine and completed the CQUIP Excellence in Quality Improvement program in 2021. Through this role Katie has been involved in initiatives to improve flow in the emergency department as well as standardizing care through the development of multiple care pathways. Her recent quality improvement work has focused on building a virtual care program in the emergency department. Katie is also interested in working with regional centres to further improve emergency care for children across all settings.

Susanna Fung is a community Family Physician and Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto. She is the Quality Improvement Director in the Department of Family & Community Medicine at the Scarborough Health Network. She teaches quality improvement methodology to family medicine residents, graduate students, and family medicine preceptors. She has an interest in medical education and has supervised residents and medical students. She is currently involved in organizing a quality improvement course for the Health Equity Certificate Program at the Scarborough Health Network.

Jacquie Follis has been an RN for over 30 years. She has a background in paediatrics and experience in the pediatric ICU, pediatric emergency department and inpatient pediatric endocrinology, nephrology and general care. Jacquie has been working at Women’s College Hospital since 2008 after completing her Master of Science in Nursing at D’Youville College in Buffalo, NY.

Jacquie is passionate about improving care and safety for patients and has completed an Advanced Clinical Practice Fellowship from the RNAO looking at transitions in care between a pediatric organization and an adult organization; a Certificate in Ombuds from York learning how to address patient complaints and concerns, and a Certificate in Quality Improvement and Patient Safety from C-QuIPS.

Most recently, Jacquie was the Interim Manager of the Covid Assessment Center and Vaccinations at the West End YMCA. She applied her previous training and experience to create high functioning and safe program that provided personalized care in a high volume, high turnover environment.  Jacquie is looking forward to utilizing this opportunity in her new role as an Advanced Practice Nurse in Professional Practice and as Lead, of Best Practice Spotlight Organization, RNAO.

Amanda Cipolla is an Obstetrician-Gynecologist at Credit Valley Hospital, Trillium Health Partners (THP), in Mississauga, Ontario. She has six years of clinical quality improvement experience as the QI lead of the Women’s Department of THP. She earned her medical degree and completed her residency training at the University of Toronto. After a year in clinical independent practice, Amanda became interested in Quality Improvement work and pursued the C-QuIPS certificate course. She has led initiatives aimed at safely reducing cesarean section rates, both locally at THP and through involvement in multi-site projects in the GTA. Her main focus has been on Implementation Science and encouraging and facilitating the uptake of evidence-based practice in routine clinical care.