The Applegarth Staff Service Awards recognize excellence in personal achievements and outstanding contributions to the Faculty of Medicine.
While traditionally this award is given to an individual, as both staff individually are outstanding, it would not have been possible to nominate one without the other as they achieve excellence together by working as a tight and supportive team. Each year since forming as a team, Carolyn and Ingrid have both taken the initiative to continue to develop skills and take on more responsibility in the delivery of service to our students and educators and they have been described as the ‘backbone’ of our Clinical Education team. Ingrid facilitates roughly 480 placements needed for our students every year. Ingrid also supports our health authority and private practice partners with national and international students who fill in the gaps while UBC students are still in school. She coordinates their placements ensuring that they fit the gaps rather than displacing the UBC students and has to take the extra steps to sort out affiliation agreements, language capabilities and the sometimes the special requirements of an out of province school.
Carolyn is responsible for developing and supporting relationships with our Clinical Educators. She has developed a strong professional relationship with our clinical educators through a range of activities. These have included organizing clinical education workshops across the province to provide both new and experienced educators with the opportunity to develop their training skills, understand our clinical curriculum requirements and have an opportunity to meet with other clinical educators. This opportunity is particularly important for our preceptors in rural and remote locations who do not have a local support network. Carolyn also produces a tri-annual newsletter for our clinical educators to stay in touch with our initiatives and developments in clinical education. Carolyn was also responsible for the development of the clinical site profiles search engine on the Department website which allows students the ability make informed decisions when selecting placement options (https://physicaltherapy.med.ubc.ca/students/clin-ed-current-students/sitesearch). It was no small feat to coordinate the gathering of placement site information from the hundreds of different sites across the province.
These are just a few of the responsibilities and achievements of Carolyn and Ingrid; they also bring many other valuable skills to their roles in the Department. They are highly worthy of this prestigious award.