Dianne Doyle started her career as a nurse at St. Paul’s Hospital in 1976 and now, more than four decades later, she’s ending it as the head of the organization, having set the stage for the planned new St. Paul’s that will serve the health needs of British Columbians for generations to come.
“It’s a little bit of a transition,” said Doyle, who is the outgoing president and CEO of Providence Health Care, on retiring after spending 42 years in the health-care industry.
Doyle was appointed to Providence’s top leadership position in 2006, bringing her patient-focused guiding philosophy to the helm after spending the previous three decades as an intensive-care nurse at St. Paul’s, followed by a leadership stint where she helped oversee the merger that led to the hospital consolidating with a number of other entities to form Providence Health Care in the late 1990s.
“It’s a privilege to work with patients and families at very critical times in people’s lives when they’re sick or suffering or dying,” Doyle, who has lived in North Vancouver with her family since 1979, told the North Shore News. “My leadership style, I think, draws upon my clinical background of trying to create an organization in which compassionate care can be lived out at an organizational level.”
Doyle was born in Kingston, Ont., and attended high school and university in Ottawa, where she got her degree in nursing.
She moved to B.C. after graduating and immediately started her career as a nurse at St. Paul’s Hospital in the mid-1970s.
Asked about her career highlights, she immediately referenced St. Paul’s Hospital’s impact during the HIV-AIDS crisis during the 1980s.
“When other organizations weren’t responding to the needs it was St. Paul’s who literally opened our own doors to HIV-positive individuals at a time when no one knew what this disease was, how it was being transmitted. All we saw were a lot of young people, mostly men at the time, dying of this horrible disease,” she said, adding that the roots of the epidemic helped create the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, a Providence-backed research institution that also disseminates health information and offers treatment programs.
Specifically during Doyle’s tenure as CEO, she noted Providence’s successful challenge of the federal government’s 2013 decision to restrict diacetylmorphine (heroin) under the Food and Drug Act – making it unavailable for medical treatment – as an important moment.
“We knew that there was strong evidence to suggest that the best and only treatment for the most heroin-addicted individuals, who hadn’t responded to other treatments, that the treatment option was medically prescribed heroin,” Doyle explained. “The federal government was not allowing that to happen, so a constitutional challenge then allowed us to make that treatment option available and from that now at our Crosstown Clinic in the Downtown Eastside we do provide service to heroin-addicted populations and have great success.”
As Doyle makes her exit from the organization (incoming CEO Fiona Dalton started this week), she said there’s still work to be done with health care in B.C. more broadly, adding that health care for seniors, improved strategies for treating mental health and addictions, as well as access to care, were what she saw as priorities for the province moving forward.
The planned new St. Paul’s Hospital and health campus in the East False Creek Flats area of Vancouver, as well as a planned Dementia Village in the city, were noted by Doyle as health-care initiatives she’s proud to finish her career on.
“Very excited about the advancement of the redevelopment of St. Paul’s,” she said. “We’ve been operating on the current site for 124 years now, we want to ensure that we’re there to serve the people of Vancouver and British Columbia for the next 125 years.”
There’s always more work to be done, she added.
“As much as I’m proud of the things that have been accomplished at Providence Health Care, the work in health care is never done. There’s always more and more improvements to be had and more initiatives to start off,” she said.
In retirement, Doyle is looking forward to travelling, spending more time with family and friends, and continuing to give back to the community wherever she can.
