From sparks to embers: Igniting the future of Canadian healthcare leadership

The Health Leadership Academy (HLA) is a joint initiative of McMaster University’s DeGroote school of business and faculty of health sciences that aims to strengthen healthcare leadership across Canada. It offers specialized programs designed to help current and emerging leaders develop the skills, mindsets and networks needed to navigate an increasingly complex and rapidly changing health system. Its approach emphasizes systems thinking, collaboration and adapting to evolving challenges in healthcare delivery and governance.The academy’s flagship offering, the national health fellows program, focuses on practical, experiential learning. Participants engage with peers, mentors and experts to tackle real-world healthcare challenges, build leadership capabilities and contribute to system-wide innovation and improvement. Overall, the HLA positions itself as a national hub for developing transformative leaders who can drive meaningful change in Canada’s health ecosystem.The academy is guided by three unique directors who bring complementary expertise in governance, strategy and clinical leadership. Jodeme Goldhar serves as a strategic advisor and program co-director helping shape curriculum around liminal space integration, systemic resilience and congregational social accountability. Michael Hartmann is a professor at McMaster’s DeGroote school of business and co-director of the HLA, with a background in governance education and executive training through the Directors College, emphasizing experiential and action-based learning approaches. Dr. David Price, a physician and professor of family medicine, serves as co-director and brings deep clinical and system-level insight, including leadership in primary care and health system innovation. Together, they knit and weave stories and connections between the previous three cohorts and this fourth cohort that I am lucky to be a member.We start slowly, intentionally, sharing our values and vulnerabilities at the sharing circle. Trust develops timidly when there are uncertainty and fear. So, we move to the “Art of Seeing” by Joyce Zazulak and Nicole Knibb which brings formal art analysis and empathy elevation into rhapsodical juxtaposition. It is more than looking at art; it is a deliberate walk forward while leaving behind your prejudices.Day 2 is when the first fires were lit. The wicked questions crackle, billow and pop out. The fire was incipient with wonder. Why does the Canada Health Act only consider hospital care and medical doctor services medically necessary? How does this document serve us 40 years after it was drafted? How can Canada as a top quartile spender in healthcare ($400 billion in 2025) achieve bottom quartile results? Why do we not trust private players in our “public” system? How do those who serve others deal with their own depersonalization, emotional exhaustion and PTSD and then continue to look after others? How is that sustainable? How do we use anger and betrayal to heal our outrage? How do the seven sacred teachings turn us from many individual viewpoints and needs to one combined purpose? What would happen if you could order medicinal herbs and spirituality in a hospital order set? What needs to change or grow or stop?The flames had risen and the hearth was getting warm now. The heat and the flames started unexpected whispers. Cohort four was anticipating inspiration. They were willing to be curious, creative and flexible. They knew the future was volatile, uncertain, chaotic and ambiguous (VUCA). Jennifer Lo of IDEO shared the futuring skill of peering for signals that are turning to trends. She made us wary of drivers (from social, technological, economic, environmental and political lens—STEEP). She pontificated on plausible futures that equilibrated the weight of the past, the push of the present and the pull of the future. And in the end, it was decided that a preferred future is possible, is probable, and even likely with collective efforts and agency.The fire was now fully developed and the following days would take us to radical collaboration.Dr. Alykhan Abdulla is a comprehensive family doctor working in Manotick, Ont.; Board director of the College of Family Physicians of Canada; chair of the general assembly at Ontario Medical Association; and director for longitudinal leadership curriculum at the University of Ottawa Undergraduate Medical Education.

From sparks to embers: Igniting the future of Canadian healthcare leadership

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