Faculty Advisors
DR. ARMAN ABDALKHANIDr. Abdalkhani is a Royal College Board Certified Otolaryngologist, specializing in ear, throat and nose. Prior to arriving in Vancouver and joining UBC faculty, Dr. Adbalkhani served as a physician in the department of otolaryngology at Palo Alto Medical Foundation and an Adjunct Faculty of Otolaryngology at Stanford University.
Dr. Adbalkhani received his Doctor of Medicine from Indiana University. During his time here, Dr. Adbalkhani received the William & Groves Hardiman Scholarship for Outstanding Medical Research. He completed his internship in General Surgery at Tulane University in 2004 and Residency in Otolaryngology at Stanford University in 2008. He is certified by, the American Board of Otolaryngology Head & Neck Surgery, and an active member of the American Rhinologic Society. Dr. Adbalkhani has 8 peer-reviewed publications, and enjoys resident teaching, hoping to continue to be involved in resident education. He is fluent in both Spanish and Farsi. When not working, Dr. Adbalkhani enjoys cycling, playing soccer and taking hikes with his family |
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DR. CHERYL HOLMESDr. Holmes is a Clinical Professor and Head of the Department of Medicine. She has practiced medicine for 34 years, first as a full-care family physician and then as an intensivist/critical care physician. Dr. Holmes has extensive administrative and leadership experience. She was the Medical Director, Critical Care, at Kelowna General Hospital from 2006 to 2014. In 2007, She founded and served as the first President of the BC Society of Critical Care Medicine. She has been the Associate Dean, Undergraduate Medical Education, Faculty of Medicine since 2017. Previously, she served as Interim Assistant Dean, Curriculum and before that Site Director for the Year 3 Clerkship at the Southern Medical Program in Kelowna.
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DR. CURT SMECHERDr. Curt Smecher is an Anesthesiologist at Abbotsford Regional Hospital, but his students also know him as “Papa QI.” Dr. Schmecher is a Lead for the Doctors of BC Provincial PQI program, and trained at IHI in Boston in their Improvement Advisor Program. He is also the founder and driving force behind Fraser Health’s Physician Quality Improvement Program, which has had a huge impact on the quality of care across Fraser Health. In collaboration with Doctors of BC, the Ministry of Health, physician groups, nurses and allied health professionals, Dr. Smecher developed a world-class quality education program for quality improvement initiatives that has become the standard for all such programs across the province. Students have been coached on how to take ideas for improving patient care and turn them into practical and workable initiatives. Quality improvement team members say the program has left them reinvigorated, reminding them of why they chose health care as a profession.
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DR. MALCOLM MACLUREDr. Malcolm Maclure, ScD is BC Academic Chair in Patient Safety and Professor in the Department of Anesthesiology, Pharmacology and Therapeutics at UBC.
Raised in Victoria in the 1960s, he studied biochemistry at Oxford and epidemiology at Harvard in the 1970s. While teaching research methods at Harvard in the 1980s, he invented the case-crossover study design, now a standard tool of epidemiology that has recently been used to investigate triggers of patient-safety incidents. As Adjunct Professor of Epidemiology at Harvard School of Public Health, he taught a course on Epidemiologic Methods for Patient Safety and Quality, 2014-2017. He is Co-Lead of the Patient Safety and Quality Theme and the Health System Leadership Theme in the UBC Medical Undergraduate Program. He serves as ex-officio member of the BC Patient Safety and Quality Council. Recently he was Research Scholar-in-Residence in the BC Ministry of Health, 2018-2020, directing a Surgical Quality Outcome Reports study |
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Carolyn CanfieldCarolyn Canfield works globally as a citizen-patient to expand opportunities for patients, caregivers and communities to partner with healthcare professionals in research, teaching, improvement and governance. Arising from sudden widowhood after her husband's care failures in 2008, Carolyn’s full-time volunteering earned her recognition in 2014 as Canada’s first Patient Safety Champion and appointment as adjunct professor in UBC's Department of Family Practice. In addition to teaching in the undergraduate medical program and School of Nursing, Carolyn is a member of UBC Health Council and the Admissions Sub-committee of the Faculty of Medicine. She co-founded the national Patient Advisors Network to develop capacity and leadership in citizen-patients across Canada.
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Nancy falconerNancy Falconer has a passion for building capacity in the health system to improve care and support the health and wellbeing of the population. She joined the BC Patient Safety and Quality Council in May of 2019 as Director of Learning and Capability Development. In this role, she leads a range of education programs focused on patient safety and health care quality.
Before joining the Council, Nancy spent over twenty years working in roles within the health and NGO sectors in the areas of health promotion, advocacy for healthy public policy, and health system improvement including positions with the Canadian Cancer Society and Doctors of BC. She holds a Master’s in Health Promotion from the University of Alberta and is currently working on her Master’s in Business Administration from Aspen University. She also obtained her Project Management certification, certificate in Leadership and Conflict Resolution and has completed many continuing programs including San’Yas Cultural Humility and Safety , Liberating Structures and IAP2. |
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Dr. Andrea jonesDr. Jones is co-founder and past president of the IHI UBC chapter. She was inspired by IHI's vision and teamed up with UBC alumni Jacqueline Singer and Gregory Marr to start IHI UBC, in order to create awareness and competency among students about quality improvement in healthcare. Andrea is passionate about providing equitable, efficient, and evidence-based care and bringing together leaders of all disciplines to develop creative solutions.
Andrea completed her MD and PhD training at UBC and is currently a Neurology Resident Physician at UBC. Her clinical and research interests involve the investigation of social and structural factors that contribute to brain health, with a particular focus on historically marginalized communities. In her spare time, she enjoys exploring the coast mountains and kayaking. |
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Dr. Cheryl SegaricDr. Segaric has been practicing nursing for over 38 years. She has extensive experience as a nurse educator (over 33 years) working with undergraduate and graduate nursing students at all levels and across various client populations and nursing practice contexts. Most recently Dr. Segaric was awarded the 2020-2021 UBC Killam Teaching prize. Dr. Segaric has a Master’s Degree in Education with particular focus on adult education and nursing curricula. She has a PhD in Nursing where her area of research focused on understanding and improving therapeutic relationships between nurses, patients, and family members around care in acute care settings in order to enhance the meaning and quality of those relationships. Dr. Segaric’s clinical passion and area of expertise is in Perinatal Nursing with childbearing individuals and their families but she also has extensive experience caring for adults/older adults with acute medical health challenges requiring hospitalization. Dr. Segaric is passionate about quality and safety education for nurses. She has been instrumental in ensuring the integration of national nursing quality and safety competencies into nursing curricula and has worked extensively with colleagues to promote education and training to enhance inter-professional teamwork with emphasis on improved communication and mutually respectful relationships among health care providers, patients and families. Other areas of interest include faculty mentorship and professional development as well as nursing curriculum development/reform including innovations and research for advancing the scholarship of teaching and learning.
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Dr. Jenna Smith-ForresterDr. Smith-Forrester is a past president of the IHI UBC Chapter, and co-founder of the UBCO and UNBC Chapters. She was introduced to QI while on a volunteer trip in the rural Honduran Highlands with the Mayo Clinic in 2010. Shortly afterwards, she got involved with the IHI and has been actively engaged with the organization ever since. She co-founded the IHI's "Health Innovation for All" Conference that united IHI Chapters from across Canada and the Pacific Northwest, and worked to integrate various QI activities and training opportunities into UBC's Medical Program. Jenna is passionate about empowering students and healthcare trainees through education in foundational QI principles. She has trained hundreds of students in QI through hosting various workshops, panel discussions, teaching at UBC medical school, and supervising medical students in QI activities.
Jenna completed her MSc in Neuroscience at UBC and went on to complete her MD in UBC's Northern Medical Program, graduating as a Valedictorian. She is currently completing her residency training in Neurosurgery at Dalhousie University in Halifax, NS. She is also a recipient of the IHI's International Change Agent of the Year Award in 2018. In her spare time, she enjoys traveling to places no one's ever heard of, and hiking with her husband and chocolate labs. |
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Nicole LEeNicole Lee is a past president of the IHI UBC chapter. She has supported the BCPSQC-sponsored Scholarship Program for over five years: before graduating, she advocated for and helped expand the program to other universities in BC and continues to volunteer with the chapter as an advisor and judge today. Nicole is a Certified Fund Raising Executive and works professionally as a non-profit fundraiser, ensuring that vital mental health and financial aid programs have the means to continue and grow. Although she no longer works directly in healthcare, she applies her QI experience to her work with local and global DEI committees, advocating to make fundraising practices and the profession more inclusive and accessible. She completed her Bachelor of Kinesiology at UBC and is now a Master of Business Administration candidate at Simon Fraser University.
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