Dr. Verna Yiu is one of Canada’s most respected healthcare leaders. She led the country’s largest provincewide health care system that protects and improves the quality of life for 4.4 million Albertans for over 6 years.
In her tenure, Dr. Yiu was able to build trust and confidence not only with Albertans but internally with the 100K+ employees of the organization. In Dr. Yiu’s tenure, AHS was named as one of the Canada’s Top 100 Employers for 4 consecutive years along with other employer awards including Best Diversity Employer, Best Employer for Young People, and Alberta’s Top 70 Employer. Other accomplishments include optimizing integration of care within the province, so much so as to receive acknowledgement from the International Society of Integrated Care that AHS was in the top 5 most integrated systems in the world. Other accomplishments during her tenure includes improving efficiencies such that growth expenditure for AHS reduced by more than 50% while still maintaining quality and safety of care, she led and received the support from government to launch the province wide clinical information system called Connect Care that will transform how care is delivered for Albertans (which remains on time and on budget if not for COVID19), and over the past 2+ years, Dr. Yiu led AHS in its response to one of the worse public health crisis we will ever know in our lifetime.
Dr. Yiu has spent more than 2 decades in leadership roles, spanning from leadership roles in academia at the University of Alberta including being the first female interim dean of the faculty of medicine and dentistry at the U of A to that within AHS. She is known to embrace a servant leadership motto where ensuring the success of others inevitably leads to everyone’s success.
Dr. Yiu has won numerous awards including most recently being Global Woman of Vision in 2019 and being ranked second on the Medical Post’s 2021 Power list of physicians in Canada, behind only Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer.
A professor of Pediatrics in the division of pediatric nephrology at the U of A, Dr. Yiu is an alumni of both University of Alberta and Harvard University. She continues to work on the front lines, providing care to young patients and their families at the Stollery Children’s Hospital in Edmonton.