Sally Jackson

For Sally Jackson, helping to support patient care, teaching, and research at the MUHC is more than a personal commitment: it is a family tradition. Jackson’s father, the late Dr. John Meakins, was a renowned respirologist after whom the famed Meakins-Christie Laboratories were named. Her brother, Dr. Jonathan Meakins, now Nuffield Professor of Surgery at the University of Oxford, was formerly Head of Surgical Services at the MUHC. And, although Jackson herself has never wielded a scalpel, her generous donation to the Best Care for Life campaign in support of minimally invasive surgery (MIS) has made a profound difference in the lives of countless surgical patients. 

Through the Sally Jackson Minimally Invasive Surgery Professional Development Fund, the MUHC’s world-renowned MIS program under the leadership of Dr. Gerald Fried has flourished. MIS encompasses a wide range of diagnostic and therapeutic procedures performed by tiny instruments that are inserted through small incisions using a device called a laparoscope. Looking at images transmitted by a remote camera, surgeons are able to perform procedures as complex as the excision of an entire organ without leaving more than a handful of stitches. Thanks to Jackson’s support, Fried and his colleagues have been able to enhance the MUHC’s laparoscopic colon surgery service and introduce new clinical programs in laparoscopic donor nephrectomy (the removal of a healthy donor kidney for transplant) and laparoscopic radical prostatectomy (the total removal of a diseased prostate). 

As well, Fried has instituted a visiting professorship program in MIS, bringing top experts from around the world to Montreal to exchange knowledge with the MUHC’s doctors, nurses, and students. Thanks to other funds raised through the Best Care for Life campaign, surgeons at the MUHC can now employ their innovative techniques in three brand new MIS suites at the Mountain campus that opened last year, solidifying the MUHC’s status as an international centre for excellence in the field. “The Sally Jackson fund has helped make the MUHC’s MIS program on of the best in the world,” Fried says. “We’re incredibly fortunate for her generosity.”

Through regular updates from Fried and his team, Jackson has stayed closely involved with the goings-on at MIS. “It’s been incredibly gratifying to see how the program has blossomed under Dr. Fried’s direction,” Jackson says, “and to watch the amazing advancements that have taken place in such a short time.” She adds that, “it feels good to know that, in my own small way, I’m following in the footsteps of my father and brother.”