While their career paths have taken different routes, Hannah and David Zitner converge on a common goal: enriching lives and fostering positive change.
David Zitner, BA 65
In his family medicine practice, David also cared for his patients in hospital. He realized early on how little clinicians really know.
“People ask you questions, and you don't have answers, so you rely on gut or intuition,” he says. “We weren’t tracking what happens to people when they have tests, procedures or treatments, so we didn’t routinely see what happens to them.”
He co-authored a ministerial task force report advising health organizations to use timely data about health outcomes to evaluate care and guide improvements to their practices.
In the early 2000s, David was recruited by Dalhousie’s Faculty of Medicine and appointed professor and founding director of the Medical Informatics program, a unique collaboration between the faculties of Medicine, Management and Computer Science.
“Clinical practice has become more evidence-based now, but there’s still a lot of art in medicine. That why patients sometimes get conflicting advice from well-meaning doctors. When the science doesn’t clearly support one position or another, people disagree — which makes it very difficult for patients to choose between conflicting opinions,” says David.
That’s why he and his late friend and colleague Dominic Covvey co-wrote a three-volume book series published in 2024. The Nature of Clinical Care explains the concepts underlying medical care and provides the layperson with the know-how to participate in their own health care and make their own informed decisions.
Now a consultant and policy advisor, David is a senior health policy fellow at Macdonald Laurier Institute, chairs the Canadian University Retirees Association Healthcare Policy Committee and regularly contributes to academic and popular media.
Looking back to Concordia, David credits professor emeritus of psychology Jane Stewart, who retired in 2007, as a huge influence.
“She was a critical thinker and encouraged students to think about issues. She didn’t stand up and preach — we discussed interesting problems and how you’d find solutions,” he says, and continues to carry the lesson through his life and work.
The next generation
Four decades after her father’s graduation from Concordia, Hannah Zitner, BA 05, was drawn to the university by its activism and community spirit. She was familiar with the city, having spent summers in Montreal visiting her grandparents and having many friends studying at McGill.
“Concordia felt like a place to get an education and to be part of a community,” says the former journalist, aid worker and risk consultant from her home in South Carolina.
“The university taught me to think critically, to understand the importance of a nuanced perspective and to surround myself with diverse ways of thinking,” says Hannah, who majored in political science. “It was pivotal in setting me on this path of wanting to do work that I believe in.”
After completing her degree at Concordia, Hannah returned to Halifax to study journalism at the University of King’s College.
Hannah Zitner in Amman, Jordan, in 2024.