By Laura Eggertson

Every time Dr. Dale Dauphinee is mulling over a major decision, he takes the ferry a short drive from his home in St. Andrews-By-the-Sea, N.B., to nearby Deer Island.

Once there, he drives to a campground to watch the Bay of Fundy tides funnel into the majestic Old Sow, the second-largest whirlpool in the world.

That site is where Dr. Dauphinee decided to accept the chair of the Department of Medicine at McGill. It’s also where he went to ponder becoming the Executive Director of the Medical Council of Canada, where he served from 1993 to 2006.

“The Old Sow symbolized the power of the environment and nature to help me think about going to new places and roles to improve education and health-care management,” he says.

“It is about planning a better route, recognizing the risks, and turning a challenge into an opportunity. Cross at low tide or high tide – never decide before your peers tell you how they see the future and what you can both accomplish and learn.”

But when it came to donating to Dalhousie University’s Faculty of Medicine, he didn’t need to watch the Old Sow to make up his mind.

Supporting his alma mater was a given.

“I think you should do that,” says Dr. Dauphinee, who graduated with his BSc in 1959, and his MD in 1964. “Dal has been good to me. I enjoyed my time at Dal, so I was loyal to it.”

Dr. Dauphinee has been such a faithful donor that Dalhousie’s MacLennan Society honoured him in 2017with its Silver pin, recognizing 25 years of giving. In fact, he has given to the university for 40 consecutive years.

Today, Dr. Dauphinee feels it is equally important for donors, including medical alumni, to support medical research and research into educational methods and innovations. He believes Dalhousie is a national leader in continuing medical education, an area where the Faculty of Medicine is currently raising money for a research professorship.

Dr. Dauphinee, a national and international leader in medical education, was the founding director of the Division of Clinical Epidemiology at Montreal’s Royal Victoria Hospital, McGill’s Associate Dean for Medical Education, and Director of the McGill Center for Medical Education Research.

Created, improved standards

As part of his lifelong interest in improving medical education, Dr. Dauphinee spent decades creating and improving standards to test and evaluate physicians. He created new networks between provincial and national licensing organizations, brought in new assessment concepts, such as adaptive on-line assessments, and mentored younger physicians, researchers, and other health-care professionals.

Today, at 86, he continues to take a lively interest in all those around him, whether they are young wait staff at his favourite restaurant, friends and neighbours in St. Andrews, or visitors inquiring about his life and career.

He and his wife, Dr. Sharon Wood Dauphinee, made their first donation to Dalhousie’s Faculty of Medicine after a tragic car accident in 1973 that claimed the lives of his wife’s brother, Merrill Wood, and Greg Stonehouse. The two young men had just completed their second year of medical school when they died in a car accident while travelling to New Brunswick for the weekend.

Sharon Wood Dauphinee, whose PhD is in clinical epidemiology and involved team care for people suffering from acute strokes, has continued to support the Wood-Stonehouse Memorial Bursary that the Wood and Stonehouse families created to honour Merrill and Greg. Since then, the Wood-Dauphinees have also supported the Killam Library and the Dal Medicine New Brunswick library.

“I lived in the Library at Dal as a medical student,” Dr. Dauphinee says. “I owed them for that. I have always supported the Library, including modern and online methods of learning, for that reason, focusing on the medical student and post-graduate trainee populations, including in Saint John.”

Dr. Dauphinee has also donated to support research at Dal into medical education, one of the Faculty of Medicine’s current fund-raising projects, and one of the university’s strengths, he believes.

Seek input, evaluate outcomes

Throughout their careers, which continued long past conventional retirement age, both the Wood-Dauphinees championed and led organizational and policy change and quality improvement in healthcare. They have advised governments, medical schools, foundations, and associations around the world; lectured at dozens of universities; and their last joint project involved consulting with the World Bank in Kazakhstan.

Dr. Sharon Wood Dauphinee’s career focused on assessing and measuring quality of life, particularly after stroke. Rehabilitation therapists worldwide use the evaluation model she developed, and the husband-and-wife team’s work on structures, processes and outcomes complemented and informed each other’s careers.

Critical to their process is encouraging leaders of any organization to engage in feedback loops that seek input from peers and those the program or service affects, in order to evaluate its real-world impact.

“We know that reflection isn’t enough,” Dr. Dauphinee says. “You have to have reflection with feedback from your patients and your colleagues on what went wrong, and what went right.”

Careful listening is at the heart of any attempt to institute change, Dr. Dauphinee stresses, and something he and Sharon Wood Dauphinee both practised in their many mentorship relationships to sustain innovations in healthcare and education.

They also practised it in their personal relationships, with their two sons, and with each other. That hallmark of their marriage continues to this day.

Sharon Wood Dauphinee now has dementia. Despite a limited ability to respond because of apraxia, which affects her motor function and makes it difficult for her to initiate a sentence, she listens to and understands her husband’s conversation, he says.

He, in turn, listens to her responses to glean each nuance of meaning – whether it is a one- or two-word Yes or No, or, more recently, a rare and treasured phrase: “I love you too.”