From the desk of Dr. Michael Gardam, Health PEI CEO
Hi everyone,
I want to let you in on something so you hear it from me first. This past Friday I gave notice to the Health PEI Board of Directors that I plan to leave the role of CEO on March 29, 2024.
I want to be clear that I am leaving for personal reasons, including being closer to my family.
If you’re wondering why I am giving such a long notice period, you can blame the real estate market and the need post our house for sale now to catch the summer. We all know that a for sale sign on my lawn will get my neighbours talking and before you know it, everybody will want to know what is going on.
For the next nine months, my plan is to continue just as I have since I started here in 2020 – making changes to the system to support staff, building resilient healthcare services for Islanders, and being open and honest with our challenges and our areas of excellence.
The months ahead will have many challenges, no doubt – that has been the one constant over the past three years. However, we also have so many opportunities and things are going in the right direction.
Our Patient Medical Homes are growing, attracting staff and making primary care more efficient and effective; our Health PEI processes for hiring are improving as we grow our talent acquisition team and work more closely with recruitment; we’ve cut a lot of red tape that made it more difficult to fund services and staff; and we’ve developed leaders across Health PEI who are working with staff to support them.
We have launched our first People Strategy and our Employee Engagement Action Plan is in full force.
We’ve moved to more data-driven decision-making.
We’ve clearly made the case that the healthcare system needs support as we move toward better services, and we have received government support through funding and logistics.
We’ve negotiated successful collective agreements and are in the middle of negotiating more that incentivize healthcare workers for supporting the system.
We've set up provincial patient flow systems to make the best use of our limited acute care resources.
There’s a lot more to do, of course. We need to look at the physicians’ master agreement to make being a family physician on PEI more attractive and sustainable. We need to find and/or build spaces for staff to provide services in a market where space is hard to find. We need to recruit many, many people and integrate new professionals such as physician assistants, midwives, and associate physicians. And we need to work with UPEI to ensure the healthcare system is ready to be a welcoming partner when the first medical students arrive.
Those are just a few priorities out of huge list of priorities. But we are checking things off the list every day. We are constantly progressing and, whether or not that progress is evident yet to Islanders receiving services, it is making a difference.
I am confident that each of you, your leaders, and the executive team are ready and able to capitalize on the changes we’ve made, well beyond March 2024.
Until then, let’s keep going!
Thanks,
Michael
Please send questions, comments, or submissions for these notes to emclean@gov.pe.ca, subject line “Notes for Michael”.