Shift: Conversations on Changing Canadian Health Care

In this episode, Kyla sits down with Dr. Brittany Ellis — an emergency physician with specialized training in geriatric emergency medicine — for a wide-ranging conversation about why Canada's emergency departments are in crisis, and why older adults are bearing the brunt of it. Dr. Ellis walks us through the full patient journey: from an older adult struggling to get home care in a timely way...

Canada has expanded the legal options available at the end of life — but the conversations with patients and families haven't kept up. In this episode, Kyla talks with Dr. Janine Brown, nurse researcher and PhD at the University of Saskatchewan, and Nabila Ashraf, public health researcher and Master's student in Aging Studies at the University of Regina. Together, they've been study...

In this episode, Kyla sits down with Dr Ginger Ruddy, a family physician and consultant with the Saskatchewan Medical Association, to break down what a patient medical home actually is, why the traditional fee-for-service model is holding us back, and what the future of primary care could look like for every person in this province. From Swift Current's same-day access model to the barriers o...

In this episode, we sit down with Angela Sereda , a senior leader in Mobile Integrated Health (MIH) with Medavie West, to discuss the shift happening in paramedicine. Angela shares her 33-year journey from a high school athletic trainer to a leader in community-based paramedicine. We explore how paramedics are expanding their role from being a purely reactive 911 service to becoming a proactive, i...

In this episode, we explore an unlikely but powerful partnership between Terry Kostyna , a "get-shit-done" (GSD) entrepreneur and small-town mayor, and  Dr. Jacob Al Hassan , an academic researcher focused on health equity. Together, they discuss their work with the Health Quality Council’s "Thrive at Home" initiative , specifically focusing on how rural communities can innovat...

In this episode, I sit down with John Mortimer , a specialist in systemic service design and founder of Impro , to tackle a concept that is silently draining the resources and morale of our health care system: Failure Demand. John explains that much of the "spinning" felt by practitioners today—the feeling of running faster while staying in the same place—is the result of a system design...

Recorded just twenty-four hours before Prairie Harm Reduction (PHR)—formerly known as AIDS Saskatoon—officially closed its doors on April 9, 2026, this episode features a deep dive conversation with social worker and advocate Erin Beckwell .  Erin shares her decade-long history with AIDS Saskatoon, starting from its roots as a community-led response to the HIV crisis to its evolution into a vital...

In this episode, I sit down with two of Saskatchewan’s most experienced health care leaders, Dan Florizone and Marlene Smadu , to explore a fundamental crisis in leadership: why we continue to treat an infinite system like a “finite game."  Drawing on their decades of experience—from pioneering "Magnet" hospital environments in the late 90s to their current work teaching excellence...

In this special episode, Kyla pauses her interviews to reflect on the key themes and insights from the first three months of the podcast.  Kyla shares what she's gleaned from conversations with Dennis, Andy, Teri, Kath and Steven - distilling the learnings from each of them into practical ideas to shift the system.  

In this episode, I sit down with Steven Lewis , a veteran health policy consultant and former CEO of Saskatchewan’s Health Services Utilization and Research Commission (HSURC). With decades of experience at the intersection of policy, research, and system reform, Steven offers a "voice of truth" that cuts through the bureaucratic clutter.   We dive deep into a critique of the broader Can...

In this episode, Kyla sits down with Teri Price , the Executive Director of Greg’s Wings Projects, to discuss her journey from disaster management to becoming a leading change agent in the Canadian healthcare system. Teri shares the powerful and heartbreaking story of her brother, Greg Price, whose death in 2012 exposed massive gaps in continuity of care and information sharing—failures that led t...

In this episode, Kyla offers a critique of Saskatchewan's newly released "Patient's First Healthcare Plan" and questions why health care systems insist on repeating the same failed approached decade after decade.  Drawing on comparisons to Denmark and Nova Scotia, she challenges the incremental approach to health care reform and calls for genuine system transformation.  Kyla ch...

In this episode Dr. Katherine Stevenson reflects on 25 years of quality improvement in Saskatchewan — tracing the shift from measurement and reporting toward collaboratives, the Accelerating Excellence strategy, large-scale Lean adoption, and attempts to build a learning health system (or whatever we want to call it!). She advocates for reintegrating technical and relational approaches and shares...

Futurist Andy Wilkins discusses rethinking health as a complex, nested system — from cells to cities — and why current siloed, “repair-shop” healthcare models won’t scale for ageing, multi‑morbidity populations. He explains the Three Horizons framework for shifting from incremental fixes (Horizon 1) to system-wide transformation (Horizon 3), shares practical examples, and offers concrete steps inn...

In this episode, Kyla sits down with Dennis Vergne, a systems improvement consultant based in London, to explore the concept of Relational Service Design and why it’s critical for transforming public services. Dennis shares his journey from a youth recreation worker in the Netherlands to consulting on complex service systems across health care, social care and the prison system.  Together, they di...