Emily joined the Council in September 2022 through our Clinician Fellowship in Health Care Quality program.

Emily Stewart is an emergency physician in Interior Health and a recent graduate of UBC’s Master of Health Administration program. Emily is passionate about both patient safety and physician wellness. 

Emily’s interest in patient safety lies at the interface of good governance and evidence-based policies or strategies to improve the safety of acute care medicine. The Emergency Department (ED) is often too busy for providers to spend time searching for appropriate patient discharge information for their patients, so this important and high-risk step of the patient care process can be sometimes neglected. Working across multiple health authorities, Emily recognized that patient discharge information varied widely from ED to ED. As a result, she has been working with the BC Emergency Medicine Network (EMN) and patient partners on a QI project to help standardize Patient Discharge Sheets (PDS) for emergency department patients across BC using evidence based strategies. The goal is to optimize the accessibility and clinical relevance of the PDS’s to increase physician and nurse uptake, increase patient satisfaction with the discharge process, improve clinical care, and reduce ED recidivism rates.

Emily also believes that physician wellness is multifactorial, an issue that requires strategic systemic change in medicine and not one-off solutions. At the provincial level, she also served for several years as a board member of Resident Doctors of BC (RDBC): as vice-president, chair of the Health & Wellness Committee, and as the director of finance during RDBC’s collective agreement negotiations year. Nationally, she served as the president of Resident Doctors of Canada (RDoC) for the 2019–2020 term, advocating for resident physicians as the COVID19 pandemic caused unprecedented disruptions in their training. She believes that that the well-being of physicians is central to being able to care for the well-being of their patients.

Emily is looking forward to working with us with the vision of creating high quality and sustainable health care for all through collaboration with patients, caregivers, and the public.