Dr. Carole Mayer, Adjunct Associate Professor, is a social worker who has specialized in psychosocial oncology focusing on rural and remote communities in Northeastern Ontario. She works collaboratively with Dr. Bultz’s team through her research program at Health Sciences North Research Institute in Sudbury, Ontario. She also works out of Halifax for the Federal Government as Regional Director of Programs for Indigenous Services Canada, First Nations and Inuit Health Branch – Atlantic Canada. Dr. Mayer is renowned for the innovative programming she developed in psychosocial oncology at the Northeast Cancer Centre, including, but not limited to, bringing psychosocial services closer to home for cancer patients and families living in rural and/or remote communities using telemedicine.
Through her research and evaluation program, she implemented screening for distress in 13 community hospitals and worked with First Nations communities to pilot similar programming. She was also a site lead for a Pan Canadian research project that looked at piloting patient reported outcome measures in addition to the standard Edmonton Symptom Assessment System scale. Her work with Dr. Bultz and colleagues focusses on bringing awareness to the unique challenges that First Nations, Inuit and Métis cancer patients and families experience in the cancer system. Through this collaborative effort she led the first international workshop on Indigenous psychosocial oncology research at the 2019 World Congress in Psycho-Oncology. She was recently invited by the International Psycho-Oncology Society (IPOS) to join the first advisory group for Indigenous psycho-oncology. Dr. Mayer continues her research in patient report outcome measures and is collaborating with Dr. Bultz and his team on data analysis and publications. She continues to represent the University of Calgary, Cumming School of Medicine, Psychosocial Oncology division as she completes her term as Past-President for the Canadian Association of Psychosocial Oncology.