Portrait of Emily Musing

When Emily Lap Sum Musing stepped through the doors of Convocation Hall after receiving her Bachelor of Science in Pharmacy in 1983, she was already looking ahead to her next opportunity.

“I remember vividly the equal parts excitement and anticipation that I felt on graduation. I had been accepted into a residency program at Mount Sinai Hospital and could not wait to start the process of putting all the things that I had learned at school into practice,” she said.  “I looked forward to meeting and learning from great role models and mentors and knew this was the beginning of a whole new adventure,” she says.

Since that day, Musing has worked tirelessly toward improving care for patients in some of Canada’s leading academic hospitals. Until her recent retirement, she was the Vice-President, Clinical and Chief Patient Safety Officer at the University Health Network (UHN). She led UHN’s sweeping Caring Safely initiative in partnership with the Hospital for Sick Children and, most recently, she co-led UHN’s COVID-19 Vaccine Strategy, delivering some of the very first doses of vaccines into the arms of frontline health care providers. This year, she will be speaking to the graduating Class of 2T2 as part of Spring Convocation ceremony for U of T's Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy and the Faculty of Dentistry.

“People who go into pharmacy have certain characteristics and those characteristics really helped me in the progression of my career,” she says. “As with other health professionals, we are interested in helping people. As pharmacists, we are also very details-oriented. After all, it matters whether you give a person 1 milligram of a drug versus 10 or 100 milligrams. So it was that combination of interest in the patient and the focus on details that gave me a really good background to get involved in medication safety and then patient safety more broadly.”

Leading transformation in health care

With over a million patients treated and cared for at UHN on a yearly basis, ensuring patient safety is a key area of focus. Musing describes the Caring Safely initiative as a safety transformation that took place across the organization starting in 2015 and is ongoing and evolving today. The initiative has been widely recognized as a success, with both SickKids and UHN being selected as a Merit Awardee of the International Hospital Federation (IHF) Excellence Award for Leadership and Management in Healthcare in 2018. A large part of this success came from an emphasis on creating systems-level change as opposed to focusing on individual actions. “We need to look at the system we have in place and understand what it is about that system that impacts how clinicians make decisions as to what they do and don’t do, in order to reduce instances of preventable harm,” says Musing.

“One of the most important things about being a leader is knowing that you can’t do everything. You have to create teams with different people around the table. You then need to ask how can we work together and take advantage of each person’s unique skills to help move us forward?” says Musing

In 2020, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic brought exceptional challenges to healthcare systems across the country. “I was really taken out of my sphere of comfort when COVID hit and I was asked to lead the vaccination strategy for UHN,” says Musing. “I didn’t have a background in how to create clinics like this, but we were among the first and went on to create a playbook for others so we could help get clinics up elsewhere.”

Pulling together a knowledgeable and effective team was key to meeting this challenge. “One of the most important things about being a leader is knowing that you can’t do everything. You have to create teams with different people around the table. You then need to ask how can we work together and take advantage of each person’s unique skills to help move us forward?” she says.

Approach lifelong learning as a mindset 

Working with and teaching students, whether as a clinical preceptor or by providing lectures on patient safety and healthcare leadership, has been a one of the most rewarding aspects of Musing’s career that has provided continuous opportunities for growth and learning. “If you are a good clinician, you can only become better when you are in an environment where you can teach others, where you must put into words what you are doing,” she says. For Musing, teaching and learning are closely intertwined and she hopes this year’s graduates will approach their careers with an openness to lifelong learning. “I hope this year's graduates consider that regardless of what environment they will find themselves in, they will always be learning and hopefully always teaching. Every interaction with a new individual, or stressful experience you overcome is a chance for learning which can then be applied to future situations.”

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