Mallery Landry

As aclinic coordinator my main purpose is to oversee the clinical activities and support the clinical staff, doctors and the research team.One of my main roles is to be the liaison person between the clinical and research team, patients, participants and care partners. My clinical duties included overseeing all neurology referrals and establish patient priorities, verifying patient information by interviewing them and their caregivers, recording medical history, family history and confirming purpose of visit. I also prepare patients for their examination by performing preliminary cognitive tests and reporting patient history summary. Following the medical appointment, I help families find community resources adapted to their needs, provide information and education on major neurocognitive disorders and help them improve their communication skills with the patient in the hopes of maintaining their autonomy and quality of life. I also assist them with all their medical, income tax or insurance forms and provide them with documentation in regards to POA, protection mandate, wills, advance directive and end of life care. As part of my role, I have to continually find ways tomake the clinic more efficient, such as optimizing the transmission of information by creating many easy to fill out online forms and ensuring that the data entered is relevant and standardized. This provides real support to research assistants when it is time to do recruitment or when we are looking to identify individuals who meet the criteria for clinical trials. Lastly, as a way to optimize patient care I am also in charge of creating SOP and training documents for the clinical staff.I have also partnered up with our genetics counselor to offer patients with extensive family history of early onset dementia with genetic testing. It is therefore my responsibility to manage the blood tests, i.e. to plan the schedule, the medical staff, the forms, the approvals and the consent. In addition, I have to follow up with the families and health care professionals to meet with these patients and families to disclose these results.Another of my responsibilities is the management of the lumbar punctures for our clinical patients such as obtaining current medication lists, sending blood draw requests and informing patients about the procedure itself. Finally, I also work in partnership with the Douglas brain bank to ensure that the research participants who are interested in brain donation understand the forms and the sequence of events related to this donation. When I am notified that a patient has deceased, I must see to it that the brain retrieval goes smoothly and that the team has all the necessary medical information.