Meet Marie Pinard, C-QuIPS associate director for Women’s College Hospital

One of Marie Pinard’s top goals as the new associate director with the Centre for Quality Improvement and Patient Safety (C-QuIPS) for Women’s College Hospital is no secret: she wants to get more interprofessional health care leaders involved in quality improvement (QI) and patient safety. As a nurse by background, Pinard has spent her career engaged in quality improvement at SickKids and Women’s College Hospital, and now she’s helping inspire others.
“Quality and safety need leadership in both the academic and operational worlds so part of our work is helping create a bridge between the two,” she said. “When you have more interprofessional providers trained in QI, you get more of those critical QI skills into the front lines of the health system which leads to meaningful changes and safer care.”
Pinard has been affiliated with C-QuIPS for almost a decade, providing support as a mentor to students and an instructor for the Centre’s certificate course. When Women’s College became part of C-QuIPS earlier this year – joining established partners Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, The Hospital for Sick Children (‘SickKids’) and the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Medicine – it was a natural fit for Pinard to take on the associate director role, said Dr. Brian Wong, C-QuIPS director.
“C-QuIPS is focused on accelerating and deepening the work of people and organizations that are passionate about enhancing quality and patient safety,” he said. “And Marie has been involved with this work for years – initially as a front-line nurse and then in a variety of hospital-based leadership roles. And it’s the wealth of experience that Marie has accrued over the years that we are so excited to draw upon as we attempt to better align the work we do with the organizations we partner with.”
Working at Women’s College where a significant focus is on ambulatory care, one of Pinard’s other goals is to expand the quality lens to capture areas beyond inpatient practice.
“C-QuIPS provides access to so much knowledge and expertise that we can leverage, and education programs that can help develop more health leaders,” she said. “I drank the Kool-Aid; QI has been my whole career and I’m so passionate about getting more people involved – I’m excited to help build our QI community by getting more of my colleagues at Women’s College involved in this important work.”