Dr. Nicola Macpherson

Specialties: Palliative Care

About The Speaker

Nicola Macpherson of Maple Ridge, BC has been teaching for Sea Courses since 2008.

She graduated from Ottawa in 1985, interned at the Royal Columbian Hospital, spent three years at the National Defense Medical Centre (two as a surgical resident and one as a medical resident), and eventually completed anaesthesia training at UBC in 1992. She worked in Prince George, then Maple Ridge, BC, with locum stints in Whitehorse YT, and Mount Isa, QLD, Australia. In 2004-05, she completed a PGY6 year at UBC.  Since then, she has worked in Fraser Health BC, Regina SK, Calgary AB, and Whitehorse.

She helped develop and present three 2-day palliative courses in Ghana (West Africa) in 2013 and 2015, and still does online teaching to the family practice residents for the Ghana College of Physicians and Surgeons.

In November 2019, she passed the first ever Royal College subspecialty exams in Palliative Medicine, 27 years after her first Fellowship.  The best studying was done during a Sea Courses cruise, sipping tropical “umbrella drinks” from coconuts on a beach in the South Pacific.

Since retiring from clinical work, she continues to teach and do projects with several local, provincial, and national organizations.  Each July, she releases an update of “Dr. Nicola Macpherson’s Little Black eBook of Palliative Pearls”. In her spare time, she is a volunteer sewist with Days for Girls Canada, sewing reusable menstrual health kits so that girls in underprivileged areas can stay in school, complete their education and hope for a better future.  In November 2022, she joined a team of Canadian women who provided menstrual health education and distributed 1000 kits in Peru.

She is also on the award-winning set-building team for Theatre in the Country (Langley), and in 2023 was promoted to locum props manager.