In our Five-Question Feature to mark the 10-year anniversary of Ariadne Labs, we highlight the staff and faculty behind the lab’s compelling work.
Mary Brindle, MD, MPH, Director of the Safe Surgery/Safe Systems Program at Ariadne Labs, comes from a very traditional academic background. She graduated Yale University for her Undergraduate degree in Art, received her MD from Dalhousie University in Halifax, and completed her general surgery residency in Vancouver and her pediatric surgery residency in Toronto. As a surgeon and researcher based in Ontario, Canada, she was accustomed to the rhythm and metrics of grant applications and publication. Yet she wanted to work more on health care improvement and innovation, so she decided to pursue an MPH at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
There, she was introduced to Bill Berry, MD, MPH, co-founder of Ariadne Labs, and had long chats about the labs’ work. And that began Brindle’s long relationship with Ariadne, culminating in being named Director of the Safe Surgery/Safe System Program in July 2020.
She is also the Scientific Director of the Province of Alberta Surgery Strategic Care Network as well as Professor of Surgery and Community Health Sciences at the University of Calgary. She has helped lead an international team to optimize the performance of the WHO Surgical Safety Checklist in High Income Countries and has worked to advance the rigor and scope of international Enhanced Recovery After Surgery guidelines.
Under Brindle’s direction, Ariadne’s Safe Surgery/Safe Systems program touched 92 million patient lives in 2022. She has continued to expand the focus of the program to include insights on how to update the Checklist and incorporate a new tool, the Device Briefing Tool, a four-item communication instrument designed for surgical teams using new or complex devices. She has also sought collaborations over different disciplines.
Q: When you were advancing in your field, when did you start thinking more about reform and innovation?
A: When I started my career in pediatric surgery, I had done some research work in the past, but it had been basic science stuff. I’d been doing gene therapy and fetal surgical work; I found it exciting in some respects, but I was just getting tired of dealing with live animals. I was uncomfortable with those poor lab animals. So I thought, well, I know it’s probably a bit late compared to others, but I’m going to get an MPH. It opened my eyes and it turned things around for me
Q: What inspires you most about Ariadne Labs’ mission and work?
A: I remember when I first came to the lab, two things that impressed me. One was the emphasis on measuring impact on lives touched and on what you’re actually doing to change the world in a really meaningful way. The other thing was how I was welcomed. I was a Canadian and no one knew me. Yet I felt that my ideas, like everyone else’s ideas, were given real attention. If you came up with an idea, people listened to it, people would stop, and they would talk to you about it. You’d feel like you weren’t just sort of pushed to the side; everyone who has an idea has a spot at the table. As a visitor and as a stranger to Boston and Ariadne at the time, that felt very welcoming, but it also felt like, wow, everyone’s interested in ideas. Everyone wants to make things happen. People are not stuck in their silos or their traditional way of doing things. And that kind of atmosphere was super appealing to me.
Q: Have you had an “aha” moment in your career when you decided what to do next?
Yes. One is this idea that you have a tool that’s as powerful and as established as the WHO Surgical Safety Checklist. But one that runs the risk of becoming – I don’t want to say obsolete because that’s not the case – but not as powerful as it could be and no longer being up to date, no longer addressing the new things that are coming up. And how do you operate within that sphere? How do you innovate there? And how do you get people excited and not just trying to keep on producing a new widget to answer something when you’ve got something great that’s there that needs to be creatively innovated upon? I think we did a really great job with that in Singapore, in which we worked together with colleagues to update the Surgical Safety Checklist and integrate the Device Briefing Tool.
Q: What excites you most about our potential for impact over the next ten years?
One of the areas that I’m very excited about is, and this will, of course, reflect my own bias coming from the surgery group, but surgery has changed a lot with how it works and how it thinks about itself. Patients are going home earlier and earlier in their recovery, and we are looking at monitoring and what communication looks like for patients outside of the traditional hospital setting. There’s a huge amount of possibility there, and I think we just barely scratched the surface of that. The home hospital program, I think, has done an excellent job of looking at what sort of high level, complex care in the community could look like. I think surgery has this real capability of doing the same thing, both within a very organized structure, like a home hospital structure, but also supporting people through mobile health technology and E-health and that type of thing.
Q: And what is the best part of working at Ariadne Labs for you?
The best part of working at Ariadne Labs is really the people. It’s the people that we see everyday. It’s that ability to interact with people who are humble, who are creative, who have excellent ideas, and who bring that to everything. I think this sort of enthusiasm is really just part and parcel of what it means to be someone at Ariadne. Only at Ariadne Labs can I post photos of my dog and get him voted as one of the top employees, and he can get feedback that he brings sunshine to people’s days.