OMSA Medical Student of the Month of April 2017 - Annie Wang
Meet Annie Wang (University of Toronto), our student of the month for April 2017!
Throughout medical school Annie has been involved in advocacy initiatives for individuals who are underserved or underrepresented in the Ontario Medical system. In 2015 she organized the Day of Action of Doctors for Refugee Care, where physician allied health and medical students took to the streets to fight the interim Federal Health Program cuts. In 2016 she attended the Citizen’s Reference Panel on Pharmacare as a medical student representative. Additionally, she has attended OMSA lobby day as a student delegate each year, and for the past 2 years has acted as part of the Ask team that developed the Lobby Day Delegate Policy Primer.
She has also taken her interest in pharmacare, immigrant and refugee health, and policy and turned them into research and position paper authorship in order to raise awareness of the issues she feels so passionately about. She has authored papers on the physician obligation to work towards providing life-saving medications throughout a national pharmacare program; position papers on childhood obesity LTC climate change and health human resources planning; and has taken part in a breast and colorectal screening research project looking at rates of screening in refugee.
Annie has also pushed for change at the grassroots level, through quality improvement. She carried out a quality improvement project at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. She evaluated the process of how patients are transferred from the Critical Care Unit to the diagnostic imaging department, in order to streamline and enhance the safety, efficiency and effectiveness of this commonly occurring process. She will also be leading a quality improvement project on board a hospital ship, the African Mercy. A vessel belonging to the humanitarian aid organization Mercy Ships, the African Mercy provides free surgeries and healthcare to patients in developing countries. She will be helping them identify frontline challenges, and catalyze continuous, measurable improvement in patient outcomes.