Sunnybrook welcomes new Vice President of Education

Welcome and congratulations to Dr. Ari Zaretsky, Sunnybrook's new Vice President of Education.

Dr. Zaretsky, also Sunnybrook's Chief of Psychiatry, is an accomplished academic and is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto. He completed his medical school and residency training in psychiatry at the University of Toronto and then completed fellowship training in cognitive-behavioural therapy at Harvard.

Dr. Zaretsky has served as the Director of Medical Education at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health as well as the Director of Postgraduate Medical Education for the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto. He played an instrumental role in transforming the U of T psychiatry residency training program, resulting in the program winning the PAIRO Program Excellence Award in 2013. 

He is an active member of the Sunnybrook Education Advisory Council.

"The last few years have been wonderful for education at Sunnybrook - we established myEducation (a learning management system for staff), we supported education research with nearly $60,000 in grant money for developing new ways to deliver health-care education, we organized two successful annual Education Weeks and we developed an Education Balanced Scorecard for evaluating our ability to fulfill the educational mission of the hospital."

Dr. Zaretsky says his immediate goal will be to differentiate Sunnybrook from peer academic health sciences centres. To accomplish this goal, he will strongly support patient and family education initiatives, develop a focus on technology-assisted education (including simulation) and establish a staff and learner wellness program in order to promote a resilient Sunnybrook.

"I look forward to embarking on my role as Vice President of Education at Sunnybrook, a world-renowned academic health sciences centre," Dr. Zaretsky says. "At Sunnybrook, each of us shares the belief that we are all life-long learners."