Sarah Vanderlinden, PA-C, DFAAPA
Assistant Director Advanced Practice, Medical College Physicians
APP Fellowship Director, APP Fellowship Program Director—Critical Care
Physician Assistant, Department of Anesthesia, Critical Care Anesthesia
Medical College of Wisconsin

Sarah Vanderlinden, PA-C, is the assistant director for advanced practice at the Medical College of Wisconsin. In her role, she focuses on advanced practice provider transition to practice promoting a foundation for clinical and professional practice. To improve onboarding satisfaction and quality, she developed and implemented the APP Phased Onboarding Program, which provides a stepwise onboarding structure improving communication and training consistency. Since 2016, Sarah is the APP fellowship director and critical care program director innovating the first centralized postgraduate fellowship at MCW. With expansion of the APP fellowship programs, Sarah created the foundational fellowship program structure to support development, best practices and collaboration across specialty programs. Sarah has practiced in critical care since 2006, where her experience as the first APP in adult critical care at MCW and rapid growth of APPs inspired her interest to promote APP practice. 

As a critical care APP leader and provider, Sarah is committed to enhancing quality team-based, patient care through optimization of workflows, operations and clinical quality. Sarah is leading a systemwide critical care team workforce assessment and is clarifying MD/APP team models and workload metrics to create common definitions, inform workforce planning and support high-reliability, multi-professional team practices. With her experience as an epic provider builder, she is involved with optimizing workflows to increase quality of patient care and promote top-of-license APP practice.

Sarah received her bachelor’s degree in preprofessional studies: anthropology from the University of Notre Dame and master’s degree in physician assistant studies from Marquette University.