Jackie Schleifer Taylor is the first Black President & CEO of a Canadian academic hospital
December 9, 2021
Throwing in the towel was never an option for Dr. Jackie Schleifer Taylor who faced many hurdles on the way to becoming the first Black President & Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of a Canadian academic hospital.
Despite four university degrees, including two at the graduate level, the Jamaican-born health care leader has been invisible in spaces that she has been more than qualified to occupy.
On a few occasions, Schleifer Taylor was mistaken for the administrative assistant taking minutes or the person in charge of the environmental aspects of the space.
“Those are very important roles, but they weren’t the reason I happened to be in those rooms,” she said.
Another time, a physician she was waiting to see came out his room, looked at her and left without saying anything.
“I heard him tell the receptionist that I am not there and she telling him I am sitting right there, “ said Schleifer Taylor whose German paternal grandfather migrated to Jamaica and married a Black Jamaican woman. “Obviously, the person in his appointment calendar with my name and credentials wasn’t perhaps the individual he thought would look like me. All of those things might have been discouraging, but at some point you have to appreciate that not everybody starts at the same place.”
After serving as Interim President & CEO at London Health Sciences Centre (LHSC) for almost 11 months, she transitioned to the role permanently on November 24.
Phyllis Retty, the Chair of the LHSC Board of Directors, said Schleifer Taylor brings a wealth of hospital and health systemic experience along with a proven track record of leadership to the position.
“She is an inspiring and transformative leader with a vision both for LHSC and Ontario’s health system,” said Retty. “We are confident her deep knowledge of health care and of the needs of patients and families, her academic achievements and the respect she generates across the health system will ensure LHSC will play a pivotal role in meeting the needs of our community and shaping the health care of the future.”
Canadian Women’s Foundation President & CEO Paulette Senior welcomed the historic appointment.
“Jackie’s accomplishments throughout her career, her distinguished educational achievements, her deep passion for health care and her unmatched leadership experience have prepared her for this role at this moment,” she said. “She’s a remarkably intelligent and intuitive leader who cherishes people, values the difference she can make in the healthcare system and approaches her work with clarity and strategic vision.”
As a leading teaching hospital and a major regional acute leader and medical research hub, LHSC had specific requirements for its President & CEO.
Having extensive experience in overseeing large and complicated organizations with shifting parts makes Schleifer Taylor the ideal candidate for the role.
She co-led the South West Region COVID Capacity and Clinical Operations Regional Advisory Committee Innovations Working Group and was a Regional Executive Advisor to the South West Local Health Integration Network and Provincial Co-Lead and Co-Chair of HealthForceOntario and the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care’s Inter-Professional Collaboration Initiative.
“I believe that the role of any leader, but certainly the present CEO, is to serve all of the really other more important people in the organization who are there to deliver excellent and very specialized clinical care that you can’t get in every hospital, the community-based services that we want to offer the local population, ensure that teaching and research are supported in that environment alongside the clinical care and everything that happens here contributes to actually improving the health system broadly, provincially and nationally,” said Schleifer Taylor who, in 2014, was recognized by ‘Profiles in Diversity Journal’ as ‘ A Woman Worth Watching’.
During her tenure as Interim President & CEO, LHSC successfully and safely navigated the worst of the pandemic and started charting its road to post-COVID recovery.
“Balancing pandemic management and every day business is a very tough moral distress that’s placed on providers, leaders and staff when it’s not business as usual because we are fighting as a community, province, country and the world this thing called COVID,” she said. “The thing I am proud the most of isn’t just that we have continued to deliver exceptional care and balance that, but the entire LHSC community has shown who they really are which is very caring people.”
Since 2015, Schleifer Taylor – who holds a Canadian College of Health Leaders Certified Health Executive designation -- has been at LHSC that is affiliated with Western University and is one of four acute tertiary pediatric hospitals in Ontario.
“With its academic mandate and the fact we have a children’s hospital within our structure and space to serve our Indigenous patient population and such a diversity in the complement of physicians and the community were very compelling for me and I just thought it was going to be a great learning opportunity,” she said. “What I have learnt since I have been here is that London and the region couldn’t be more opening and welcoming. Coming from Toronto to a community that’s smaller and where a lot of what you see in the media doesn’t speak to an immediacy understanding of diversity, I found that in this environment, it was alive and well and I can actually contribute and be seen.”
Finding her passion to serve, Schleifer Taylor discovered at an early stage in life, was a perfect fit for a career in the health care sector.
“By the time my parents decided to come to Canada, they had lost two of their children and were uncertain about the ‘why’,” the registered physical therapist pointed out. “They had another child who was differently abled and needed to access health care. I have been really aware of the health system and how health can shape and impact everything in a person and in a family’s life since I was a kid. Because I experienced the good, wonderful, bad and not so great aspects of how as a racialized person you can find yourself within the health system’s space, I chose a profession in which I had personal encounters of what were very positive. Once I entered health care as a clinical practitioner, people turned to me as an informal leader whether I had a title or not. I was nominated to it.”
Schleifer Taylor’s family suffered another heartbreaking loss 12 years ago when the youngest of the seven siblings, Michael Schleifer, succumbed to a brain aneurysm in Quebec at age 42. He was an International Chess Master who taught the sport for a living.
She credits her late father, Thomas George Schleifer who, with his wife Mildred, brought their family to Toronto in the late 1960s, with having a significant impact on her life. He passed away in 1993.
“With my parents having lost children, my mother – as any strong Jamaican woman would – got back up on her feet and moved forward,” the former President of the College of Physiotherapists of Ontario and National Director of the Board of Directors of the Canadian Alliance of Physiotherapy Regulators said.
“Not only did my father do that also, but he carried the weight of that in his pocket every day. He was very emotional and the gentlest of souls. He wasn’t a man of many words, but when he said something, it was so rich with hope, encouragement and positivity. I often think of the things he said about how to treat other people and what’s important. Those were things you can’t really teach someone if they haven’t learned it by the age of seven.”
Without a father to lean on for advice and guidance as she moved up the corporate health care ladder, Schleifer Taylor found a soothing voice in her father-in-law, Dr. Clifford Taylor, who died last October in Toronto at age 95.
A co-founder of the Kingston College Old Boys Association Toronto chapter and Centenary Hospital that’s now part of the Scarborough Health Network, Taylor – who left Jamaica in 1949 to do pre-medical studies at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick and was a member of the Canadian Navy – practiced family medicine in Toronto for five decades and, with his wife Janet, contributed to the organization of the first Caribana parade in August 1967.
“He was someone who was humble and just beloved because of his belief in the importance of serving, patient care delivery and the high standard of excellence,” she said. “He just always encouraged me to be myself and to not underestimate the doors that I found being opened as my career went along. If I ever expressed surprise at any opportunity or recognition that I received, he would quietly say, ‘I am not surprised’. That was particularly meaningful for me as my father passed away before my leadership career started.”
After interning as a receptionist at an Indigenous community health centre in downtown Toronto while enrolled at Malvern Collegiate Institute, Schleifer Taylor completed Bachelor of Science and Health Sciences (Physiotherapy) degrees at McMaster University and a Master of Science and PhD at the University of Toronto.
Just after completing high school, she met Paul Taylor and they were married in 1988. The couple has three children.
