After more than 20 years in practice, and in conjunction with a change in federal law, Dr. Green re-focused her work in 2016 on medical assistance in dying (MAiD). She has experienced the work, the people, and their families as extraordinary, and is constantly aware of the deep privilege of being invited into such an intimate time in another person’s life.

Dr. Green is a co-founder and the current President of the Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Providers (CAMAP). She is a co-lead for the Canadian MAiD Curriculum Project. She is a medical advisor to the BC Ministry of Health MAiD oversight committee, a moderator of CAMAP’s national online forum, has provided expert testimony to the Canadian House of Commons and the Senate, and has hosted several national conferences on the topic of assisted dying. Dr. Green enjoys speaking about MAiD to the public, to health care communities, and to a wide range of audiences locally, nationally, and internationally. She is a member of the clinical faculty at both the University of British Columbia and the University of Victoria and has published an internationally bestselling memoir – This Is Assisted Dying – a doctor’s story of empowering patients at the end of life – about her first year of providing this care.

After obtaining her medical degree at McGill University in 1993, Dr. Green completed a residency in Family Medicine and then fellowships in Palliative Care and Infant and Maternal Health. She enjoyed a full-spectrum, academic family medicine teaching practice with a strong focus on multicultural maternity and newborn care in downtown Toronto. Dr. Green was Director of Family Medicine Obstetrics in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at St. Michael’s Hospital when she left in 2001 for a year in the USA. Dr. Green relocated to Victoria, BC in 2002, where she founded the Quintessence Maternity Group, the region’s first “hard-call” maternity service allowing practitioners to provide continual care throughout a woman’s entire labour and birth experience. Her passion for providing high-quality, evidence-based, patient-centred maternity care was appreciated by her students, her colleagues, and her patients.

Dr. Green no longer practices maternity care, she is now primarily focused on her work in assisted dying and has become an author and sought-after speaker. Dr. Green continues to provide infant male circumcision (see below) on Vancouver Island, BC.

Initially trained in infant male circumcision during her family medicine residency in Montreal, Dr. Green began providing circumcisions in Victoria BC in 2012. Often framed as an emotional, even controversial issue where she lives, Dr. Green’s rationale for providing circumcision is based as much on her respect for patient autonomy as on her own skillset.

Both the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Canadian Paediatric Society have position statements suggesting that families should be given the most up-to-date, objective medical information on neonatal circumcision and encouraged to filter that information through the context of their family traditions, their core values, and their cultural or religious beliefs, noting: “The ultimate decision regarding circumcision of a baby boy is the parents’. Parents should feel both informed and supported in this decision.”  Dr. Green is dedicated to providing exceptional care without judgment or pressure, and she practices a patient-first policy where the patient is respected and empowered– and the physician acts as an expert resource and an outstanding care provider.

For more information about Dr. Green’s work in circumcision, you may visit her practice website at gentlecirc.ca.