Moving this mountain is going to take all of us with Jennifer Zelmer, President and CEO of Healthcare Excellence Canada

Healthcare Change Makers

Our guest today, Jennifer Zelmer, is the newly appointed CEO of the organization formed through the amalgamation of the Canadian Foundation for Healthcare Improvement and the Canadian Patient Safety Institute. It’s called Healthcare Excellence Canada and we were fortunate to speak with Jennifer on the exact day the organization officially opened its doors, March 3.

Jennifer did her undergraduate degree in health information science at the University of Victoria and did several work terms in India, Australia, Denmark, and Canada. Those experiences awoke her interest her healthcare transformation – and since then she’s been dedicated to finding ways of making care not just better and safer, but how to scale those improvements so everyone can benefit.

Jennifer joined the Canadian Foundation for Healthcare Improvement as President and CEO in 2018 and was previously president of the Azimuth Health Group where she was a strategic advisor to leaders who sought to advance health and healthcare at local, national, and international levels.

Although they didn’t plan to bring the two organizations together in the midst of a pandemic, Jennifer is excited by the possibilities. “Amalgamation is a process, not a journey,” she says and knows change won’t happen in a day. But she’s dedicated to leading the organization in helping shift the conversation in healthcare in some simple and profound ways. It starts with asking not “what's the matter with you” but “what matters to you”.

Quotables

“Looking for opportunities for where were some of those levers of change and how could you put them together to make transformation happen.”

“We need to learn from some of those preparedness pieces as well as from the response during the pandemic.”

“This was an amalgamation that we chose as organizations to embark on, so quite a different context from amalgamations where that choice isn’t yours. Coming together as organizations just made sense.”

“It’s not just about individual innovations, but also about building our capacity for fostering excellence in the health system.”

“Culture is fundamental to patient safety.”

“The need for that connection has never been more clear. There’s absolutely no substitute for just spending that time to be able to connect, even if we’re connecting in different ways.”

“There has never been more focus on healthcare than now (in my lifetime at least), so where are those opportunities, to say ok, here now we can move this mountain together. It’s going to take all of us, going to take some heavy lifting, there will some twists and turns in the road we didn’t expect, but we’re committed to getting there together.”

Mentioned in this Episode:

Healthcare Excellence Canada

Myer Horowitz

Azimuth Health Group

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