John Carsley

Job Title
Medical Health Officer

Department/Location
Vancouver

How long have you worked at VCH?
Seven years.

Tell us what you do at VCH in one or two sentences:
I’m one of VCH’s medical health officers in Vancouver and medical advisor to some of VCH’s public health programs: early childhood, injury prevention, and population health. I also work a great deal with the city of Vancouver around our shared Healthy City Strategy.

What’s your favourite thing about your work?
It’s a fabulous job and there are a number of great things about it. To mention but two: first, I get a badge (made of metal, not plastic!). Always wanted one, but we didn’t have them in Québec, where I spent my career before moving to VCH seven years ago. Second, I get to work with the premier English-speaking public health team in Canada (Toronto’s might be much bigger and richer, but we have more fun).

How does your work contribute to the VCH True North goals?
Our work contributes directly to the goal at the top of our True North pyramid – better health for our communities. Through our preventive programs and our work in developing healthy public policy outside the health sector we can have a direct influence upstream from illness and injury on the determinants of health, rather than applying very costly, Band-Aids, no matter how effective. Check out the ICBC pedestrian safety campaign for an example some collaborative work we do in the injury prevention sector.

One thing we might be surprised to learn about you:
You might be surprised that before coming to BC later in my career, I had never worked in public health in English, but most people tell me I speak it pretty good now.

Who is somebody that you consider a major role model in your life?
I have been very lucky in having a number of excellent role models and mentors (although I’m so old that the word had not even been invented then). Dr. Alan Ross, the eminent McGill pediatrician, first got me started on the prevention road when he made a house call to extract what seemed to be (to my three-year-old mind, at least) a whole slice of bread from my nose, into which I had just pushed it. It was all too clear, as I lay on the living room sofa, mortified at what I had done, that I could have simply NOT stuck the slice up my nose to prevent a very embarrassing, but not life-threatening episode. Prevention is always the best medicine. Happily, Dr. Ross did not write me off immediately as a lost cause and later encouraged me to apply to medicine and then to pursue public health.

Who or what inspires you?
It was work of Sir Wilfrid Grenfell in northern Newfoundland and Labrador that probably had the most effect on my choice of career. Grenfell was a GP/surgeon missionary who set up a whole health system in the Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland and the Québec and Newfoundland and Labrador, starting in the late 1800s. Grenfell very quickly saw that the folks of the inshore fishery and aboriginal population needed more than just someone to sew them up, drain abscesses, set limbs, remove inflamed appendices, perform C-sections, and send TB patients to the San. He built schools, social enterprises, farms and dairies, and, over the years, recruited thousands of summer volunteers from Canadian and US universities to build, teach, and mentor kids and families. He was a true pioneer in addressing the social determinants of health and was revered by the people of the coast (and my entire family). He was also, at times, totally wrong-headed, and a classic example of 19th century muscular Christianity, with all the good and the not so good that entailed, but definitely inspiring.

Most healthy habit:
My healthiest habit, I suppose, is playing squash a couple of times a week, (this is my 50th season doing that) although my most famous healthy habit is my excellent homemade treadmill office desk (I admit it’s only the desk, not the treadmill, that’s homemade), the envy of VCH corporate offices.

If an actor or actress played you in a movie, who would it be?
John Cleese would do my rants perfectly and the Ministry of Health would be more likely to listen to him than me…