Jan 13, 2025
In October, we were ecstatic to announce that long-time board member Beth Vachon officially stepped into her role as Board Chair. With this new step, she reflects on the past decade she’s served as a member of HQC’s board and her remarkable career in the Saskatchewan health system.
Beth’s history in health care
With over 30 years of expertise in Saskatchewan-based care, Beth is the perfect fit to sit at the helm of HQC’s board. Starting her career in Swift Current, she dedicated herself to the community as a psychiatric nurse for 20 years before transitioning from healthcare’s front lines into a string of pivotal leadership roles.
“As my career went on, I took on more and more supervisory roles and eventually became the CEO of the Cypress Health Region,” Beth said.
A Swift Current resident, Beth commanded the role with an intense passion for finding the most efficient ways to bring accessible health care to the province.
After seven years of successful leadership as CEO, she was given the opportunity to help spearhead one of the largest organizational changes in Saskatchewan health care history: the formation of the Saskatchewan Health Authority.
“The decision was made that the 12 health regions would amalgamate into one health authority,” Beth said. “So, I went to work at the Ministry of Health and helped pull together a team from around the province.”
Once the health authority officially launched, Beth became VP of Quality Safety and Strategy, advocating for patient centered care in the role until retiring in 2022.
Enter, HQC
Beth and the Saskatchewan Health Quality Council first crossed paths during her time as CEO of the Cypress Health Region.
Rooted in accelerating quality improvement in health care, HQC assisted the region in administrative data analysis, helping them understand their system’s performance and illustrating gaps in quality.
“HQC staff would come in and work with my board around understanding metrics and measurement and the things that were important that we as a system needed to be thinking about,” Beth explained.
“HQC really is about accelerating learning within the health system, allowing people who are providing care to work more effectively with the right information. There’s research that happens around things like best practice, looking at examples around the world that we could start to look at and incorporate to make health care safer, more effective, here in Saskatchewan.”
Beth was appointed to the board in 2015, bringing with her, her passion, wealth of experience, and knowledge about the Saskatchewan healthcare system. She quickly became an integral part of the Audit and Finance committee.
Over the last decade, Beth said she has loved watching HQC’s focus grow from the formal, overarching health system to something much more inclusive.
“Over the last few years, HQC’s focus has still been on the formal health system, but it’s also looking at all of the other organizations within the province that contribute to the health and population of Saskatchewan,” she said. “You can start to actually pull people together – look at community-based organizations and bringing them together to a community collaborative and make real connections.”
We are currently using this collaborative, relationship-based approach to advance our two key focus areas, Thrive at Home, a program designed to enable aging in place, and Four Winds, an initiative with a goal of advancing mental health supports for First Nations youth.
Stepping into the role of Board Chair
After serving 10 years as an irreplaceable member of the board, we believe there is no better time for Beth to take the title and responsibilities of Board Chair – and she agrees.
“HQC is in such a good place right now,” she said. “There’s stability with staff, there’s such great leadership – there’s a real vision.”
According to Beth, her new role will allow for better relationships with HQC leadership, higher levels of support and a renewed focus on tightening the gaps in Saskatchewan health care.
Beth said she is most looking forward to digging her heels in, in the years ahead, watching the Four Winds and Thrive at Home teams reach their goals.
“I’m really proud of the fact that so much service gets provided by community-based organizations who have very limited funds and very limited resources,” she said. “HQC just provides so much support.”
Moving forward
In Beth’s words, it doesn’t matter where you go in the world, every region is struggling with similar health care challenges.
And while she says you can’t “cookie-cut solutions”, we are putting to the test what Beth says is HQC’s biggest strength to tackle these issues – facilitation and relationship building.
“HQC brings people together, and they’ve been doing that for the whole history of HQC,” she said. “When you can really pull people together and say, ‘how can we do this better’, it’s easier to brainstorm and think about different ideas – connect with people around the world who have similar challenges to us and might be solving them in different ways or ways that we can support others to solve their problems.”
For Beth, HQC’s success is about becoming a leader in not just Saskatchewan, but across Canada and the world.
We look forward to watching and collaborating alongside her as she points her unwavering dedication forward in her new journey.
