Summary: Improving the patient experience has become an increasingly important topic in healthcare settings as it is driven by a desire to provide better outcomes and integrate perspectives of quality, safety, and service delivery. Today’s presentation will not only highlight what has been done in the past to reduce complaints but will also focus on many positive experiences and highlight the important role the Patient Experience and Safety Program plays. Ultimately, through effective management and leadership, we to hope to show how we can support each other in improving the patient experience moving forward.

Christopher Sulowski has been a Pediatric Emergency Medicine Physician at McMaster Children’s Hospital since 2011. He became Deputy Chief of Pediatric Emergency Medicine at McMaster in 2014 and more recently took on the role of Interim Medical Director of Pediatric Emergency Medicine in March 2021. As part of his role, he has handled patient complaints in the Division since 2014 and has managed over 150 complaints. He is also the McMaster lead on the Pediatric Tele-medicine Connecting Hospitals (Peds-TECH) program, virtually linking the McMaster Children’s Emergency Department to the Niagara Health System via OTN.

Nicole Rakowski currently works as a Patient Experience Specialist and Clinical Manager of the Vaccine Clinic at Hamilton Health Sciences. Prior to this role, Nicole was a consultant for the Hamilton Health Team, the Health Links Transformation Lead for Hamilton and Niagara North West (where she provided leadership, direction and guidance to teams in order to achieve optimal results and meet provincial targets that were created by the Ministry of Health and Long Term Care), and has experience both working in Public Relations and in the President and CEO’s office at HHS (brand management, policy and governance structure management). She is concurrently completing her PhD in Health Management through the DeGroote School of Business at McMaster University.