Alumni Stories

Where are they now? Charter Class Alumna thrives in rural Francophone practice

Reflecting back, Dr. Lyndsay Berardi says her mother’s experience with breast cancer ignited her ambition to become a family physician. At the time, Lyndsay was a Francophone teenager in Kirkland Lake. Her mother’s diagnosis marked the beginning of many trips to Sudbury for cancer treatment, and for Lyndsay, it would chart the course of her career in medicine. “Even though I was relatively young, I was acutely aware of some of the inequities in accessing health care; having to drive three-and-a-half hours to go to Sudbury for my mother’s oncology appointments and there were times when I wouldn’t see her for six weeks becaus...

Putting social accountability into everyday practice

Dr. Ella Goodman, graduate of the Northern Ontario School of Medicine’s (NOSM) Charter Class of 2011, constantly puts social accountability into practice. For the past nine years she’s provided care to highly vulnerable populations at the Norwest Community Health Centre in the south-east area of Thunder Bay. “We have a large number of low-income families, unattached patients without family doctors, a large Syrian refugee community, a large urban-Indigenous population and a lot of underserved people in general. We're always working to better understand everyone’s needs, to better provide health care and access to the health ser...

NOSM-acquired Skills Help Fill a Gap in Care for Underserved Populations

Dr. Andrea Haner (MD Class of 2010) is applying the skills she learned at NOSM to treat diverse, underserved populations. She is the only GP Oncologist treating gynecological cancer in the Southwest Alberta region. “The population I work with is very underserved. If I didn’t do this work, women would have to commute to Calgary—a two-and-a-half-hour drive into the cancer centre for most,” says Dr. Haner. “Instead, they can come to Lethbridge for chemotherapy treatment.” The skills Dr. Haner learned at NOSM, with a focus on the personal side of medicine, helped prepare her for the subspecialties she’s taken on, includin...