Leadership and Workforce Management: Shaping the Next Normal

From a procurement perspective, we had to work really quickly with vendors and had to make emergency purchases. We also had to do things a lot faster than normal, making some people uncomfortable. However, in a way the pandemic came at a good time for the organization. Less than a year before the pandemic, we switched out our desktops for laptops. At the time it was a big change that was very disruptive in itself, but it ended up making a real difference. There were some working-from-home practices already in place, but for most staff it was foreign territory. So …

Addressing Legacy Systems & Looking to Sustainable Modernization

Clearly this is an unsustainable process, but is common across many departments, and was the standard at Veterans Affairs as well until 2015. We provided a standard IT service where business groups focused on analog processing to solve problems, but our core processing system was aging. It was over 15 years old, and rather than changing the system – which was expensive and no one knew what to change it to anyway – the department simply hired more staff to deal with “a legacy system that needed to be updated three times a year. By 2016, it was clear that …

Advancing Digitally Enabled Integrated Care Systems

COVID-19 was first and foremost a health crisis, so using that as an opportunity, the hospital group decided to reimagine access to care, and it allowed us to be creative. They wanted to leverage technology to produce results for their patients, whilst also being mindful of our systems and the evolving nature of COVID-19. The result was an LTC remote monitoring program. With the implementation of a specific tool, the program was designed to detect early signs of decline in the health status of residents in nursing homes. The tool that they used was Preview-ED (Practical Routine Elder Variants to …

Procurement Transformation: Integrating New Engagement Approaches to Ensure Supplier Diversity

A large federal government, like the Government of Canada, is involved in a vast array of activities and processes, many of which affect and impact the lives of its citizens. Some of these services affect citizens in direct and obvious ways, whilst others are more indirect and less known. One of these indirect services – which is no less important – is the field of procurement. It may not seemingly impact the lives of citizens on a daily basis, but Clinton Lawrence-Whyte, the Director General of Procurement Assistance Canada within Public Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC), says that procurement is …

Personalized and Intuitive Healthcare with Technology

Across much of the healthcare sector worldwide, the global pandemic that many of us are still living through, exposed some of the fault lines that many of the medical professionals have known about for years. The medical sector – like most sectors – is not perfect and is not immune to problems. In fact, many of the larger problems have been festering for a long time, but the sector has been too busy or too blind to address them. Though the pandemic has exposed this publically, an institution like Hamilton Health Sciences knew that there were issues many years earlier. …

Inspiring Communities Spotlight Interview

Inspiring Communities, a not-for-profit organization based in Nova Scotia, is an equity-centered systems change leader in Atlantic Canada. We recognize that our current systems and institutions don’t work for the people who need them most. We believe that collective action is essential, so we innovatively connect communities. We create collaborative systems partnerships and measure our impact. To ensure our effectiveness and sustainability, we maintain a strong core. We engage in reflective evaluation practices to learn from our experiments, integrate that learning into our work, and share what we’ve learned through our regional and national networks. Our initial funders from the …

Improving Leadership Representation for Women from Diverse Backgrounds

The following ten rules are based specifically on Senator Jaffer’s experience, but she says they are particularly important if you want to break down barriers. That is a very difficult thing to do, but it is much easier than it was 50 years ago. Moreover, there is a much bigger group of women in the public service these days, verging on 50%, but there is still not the diversity of backgrounds in the parliament or in the public service as there is in general society, so there is still a lot of work to do in order to get the …

Delivering Healthcare to Remote Communities

The intention was for the care of patients to be as “uninterrupted as possible,” and this even included the publication of a “playbook and other resources to help physicians.” The first few months of the pandemic in remote locations led to a lot of lessons being learned, many of which “were not anticipated.” In Yukon for instance, in the northwest of the country, “we were very rapidly able to move to providing consultations either over a platform or over the phone, so that was excellent,” and the transition to virtual care was all but seamless. One of the positive but …