A big congratulations to Dr. Vanessa Maclean, Physician Design Lead and trainer extraordinaire for the Alberta Health Services (AHS) Chief Medical Information Officer (CMIO) training program, who has won the distinguished May Cohen Award for Women Mentors. Vanessa's accomplishments were recognized in last week's message to all AHS staff.
From Dr. Verna Yiu, AHS President and CEO, and Dr. Laura McDougall, AHS Senior Medical Officer of Health:
Former South Zone Medical Director Recognized for Mentoring
We’d like to congratulate longtime Lethbridge physician Dr. Vanessa Maclean - a former medical director in the South Zone of Alberta Health Services - for receiving the May Cohen Award for Women Mentors. The award is presented to a female physician and Canadian Medical Association member who has demonstrated outstanding mentoring.
Starting as a family physician in Lethbridge in 1987, she later became an emergency department doctor, then medical director for the zone. Dr. Maclean retired from that position in 2016 but remains active in the medical community.
As medical director, she kept an eye out for promising young physicians with big ideas, making sure they had a chance to be heard, and made herself available when they needed advice or support. In 2017, she conducted a review of the experience of female physician leaders in Alberta; it found women are under-represented in leadership positions in healthcare and encounter barriers to achieving those positions.
Today, Dr. Maclean’s work focuses primarily on the establishment of Connect Care, and she is still actively mentoring women and other emerging leaders.