EW 012 – How To Transform Healthcare By Fundraising Like A Business – How CEO Jodi Abbott Is Helping The University Hospital Foundation Win Big

Gordon Sheppard (00:02.052)
Dr. Abbott, welcome to the show.

Jodi Abbott (00:04.706)
Thank you so much, Gordon. Happy to be here with you today.

Gordon Sheppard (00:08.1)
Well, I think, you know, I'm lucky, but the audience is lucky. We don't even have time, hours and hours, to go through your entire resume with the number of sort of accomplishments and leadership positions that you've held at the head of so many organizations. And so again, for the people coming into this one, they're gonna really wanna get a feel for who you are. And if you had to describe yourself sort of at a party for the people that don't know you, how would you describe yourself?

Jodi Abbott (00:34.926)
So I would say first of all, I'm busy. I get things done and I'm inspired by change really being able to dig in in an organization and bring them to something new and something different.

Gordon Sheppard (00:49.467)
You've done that over and over again. Is that fair at the head of-

Jodi Abbott (00:53.346)
bit. Yeah, you know, right now I am the President and CEO of the University Hospital Foundation and we can talk a bit later about kind of the change path that we've been on. Prior to that, I was with Norquest College and was really excited to be there because we took that institution from a little tiny institution that nobody knew to a really important post-secondary institution in Alberta. And previous to that,

I was an executive level person at Alberta Health Services as a senior vice President.

Gordon Sheppard (01:30.927)
Remarkable, remarkable. again, I don't know if it's a half a dozen or a dozen boards with your experience in there too that you've served on as well. So you've been in sort of the biggest conversations at the biggest institution levels. And now you're dedicating yourself, I guess lucky for the University Hospital Foundation, the people that benefit from it. Just for a second, just in case people don't know what the University Hospital Foundation does, maybe give us a few sentences about that as well.

Jodi Abbott (01:54.188)
Yeah, the University Hospital Foundation, our history, you know, we're 60 plus years old and our goal has always been to generate revenue for innovation in the Academic Health Centre. And when we talk about the Academic Health Centre, we're talking about the University of Alberta Hospital that includes that hospital, the Kaye-Ebbington Clinic and the Mazankowski Alberta Heart Institute, as well as our integration with the University of Alberta, primarily in the health sciences.

So we're very, very fortunate in Edmonton that we are situated in the Academic Health Centre. So our goal really is to be a catalyst for health system transformation. And we do that through generating revenue and funding innovation and change in the health system.

Gordon Sheppard (02:44.175)
And the generating revenue game at that high level is not a simple thing. And I think that's gonna lead us into our maybe first question around this, which we ask every leader that comes on the show, which is if you had to describe your biggest win in the work that you do in the last while, what would it be and how would you describe it?

Jodi Abbott (03:01.026)
I would say our biggest win has really been trying to re-situate philanthropy into more of a business model versus a traditional charitable sector model because I think we've had hundreds and hundreds of years of an attitude around charity and at the end of the day if we actually operate more like a business and invest and watch where we're going, have really really good plans, we are going to

be able to raise more money, which then goes right back into the health system to do many things. It can be to improve care, but it could also be commercialize a product that ends up being absolutely significant for the health of Canadians and the world.

Gordon Sheppard (03:49.625)
If I'm a donor, are you just gonna ask me to cut a check, say thanks, and get me a nice dinner sometime? Like, what are you doing differently when you say, resituate philanthropy?

Jodi Abbott (03:57.75)
Yeah, I would say first of all, our donors are smarter and smarter and what they want to see is a return on their donations. So we all, when we make a donation, we work extremely hard to be able to fund that donation. We all work hard in our businesses, in our jobs, and they want to see an outcome. So I would say in the past, traditional philanthropy would have been, you give me a donation, we thank you, we make sure that you

understand the impact and then if we can show the impact we come back to you and say will you give again. I think the world has changed a lot. Things are a lot more fast-paced and because of that we are approaching donors from a different perspective to say first of all how do you take this donation more like an investment so you can really see the return on your investment because that's going to keep the flywheel moving.

if you can continue to invest, show the outcome and have donors come back to the table. So we are engaged in things like program related investment or venture philanthropy where the stakes are a little higher, we're taking a bit more risk, but at the same time putting dollars into things that truly can change the world in healthcare.

Gordon Sheppard (05:24.945)
Change the world. What a relief the donors must have when you approach them with this attitude. These are sophisticated people, right? These are people that are, they've been around the block and many of them you would deal with people from all levels of the ability to donate, but certainly those upper level people would be hearing language right now that I'm sure must put a smile on their face as opposed to again that same old maybe rubber chicken dinner that they've gone to too many of.

Jodi Abbott (05:50.83)
Yes, it's very interesting because in 2020 we developed a new strategic plan and part of that strategic plan rather than looking at mission and vision we said we want to look at promise and purpose and so what we identified really as our promise is to be an agent of hope and so not just give hope but be that catalyst that creates hope and it could be hope for eliminating a disease, curing

a disease, allowing healthcare to be delivered differently. And then our purpose is very, very bold. It's saying we want to really tackle the biggest health challenges that are out there. We're not afraid of doing that. And through generating revenue, be able to put that revenue and that investment into things that will matter and will truly change the trajectory.

of Health.

Gordon Sheppard (06:52.209)
I love it. Have you got an example of, again, that you can shed some light on for where you've connected one of these, I'm going to say sophisticated or donors with the philosophy and the approach? Can you just give us an example of someone that you've sort of dealt with and then they saw they wanted to get into your philosophy of seeing that return on their donation? And then what was the end result there? Like can give sort of, we can get a bit of a story that can pull this all together.

Jodi Abbott (07:17.896)
Sure, so I would say Don Hunter, who is a donor of ours. Don was in his prime involved in oil and gas in Alberta, Don's in his 90s now. He had, his spouse had Alzheimer's disease and unfortunately Sophie passed away almost a year ago and he had really looked at who's doing the most progressive work in Alzheimer's. So he looked around the

world, he wanted to donate and put his money somewhere. And interestingly, he found it right here at the University of Alberta. Dr. Jack Jemandis and Lauren Terrell were working on a drug, essentially a chemical compound that would reduce Alzheimer's in mice, so reducing dementia in mice. And so through the relationship we built with Don, he made a formula

million donation and he said rather than leave it in my will what I want to do is I want to activate the money now because I want to see what can happen. So what we did is we worked with the researchers and through that Dawn said I want to give this money to the University Hospital Foundation, but I want you to be able to find matching donors. Well as you can imagine dementia and Alzheimer's no matter where you

you know someone, a family member and all of the spillover of those people doing the care. It's everywhere in our community, sadly. And so what we did, we were able to raise and I think we're still raising money. We're probably sitting at about $12 million right now. And through this, what we're able to do is invest in the researchers that are going to take this drug to clinical trials

and ideally put it into my hands and your hands. So instead of us just giving a grant to a researcher, because that's typically what we would do, we would grant the money and we would say, give us an update when you're making impact. And if they hit it big, they would come back and say, thank you and give us a handshake. But it wasn't doing anything to really ensure sustainability of our organization so that we can do this with other areas.

Jodi Abbott (09:47.328)
So Don was very astute and said, yes, I do want to be involved in using my donation as an investment. So what's happening now is those researchers have developed a company and we will be able to make a program related investment. have money in the bank that we invest on, you know, mortgages, stocks and bonds all the time. But this allows us to

directly invest in health and really changing the trajectory of Alzheimer's disease. And so there's tremendous interest from donors because they can see that this can really put the University Hospital Foundation in an incredible position to support other things as they come forward.

Gordon Sheppard (10:40.101)
That's a great story. And again, I can think of my friend's mom right now who will benefit, you know, will benefit or someone, you know, in their family is going to benefit from this very thing. A Made in Alberta story, someone taking their donor dollars and taking them around the world, but finding that sort of right here in Edmonton kind of story, that's remarkable. You can hear the way that you're talking to donors is leading the way, backed up by your promise and your purpose being very, very clear. And then the back and forth that you're doing, you're iterating.

like any business would. You're iterating with the donors and say, we could do it this way. But in his case, Mr. Hunter said, well, why wait till I'm going to die? I want to see sort of things happening along the way. So there's so many different things, again, as you shift from this maybe older approach into this newer approach and you're getting real results. It's pretty remarkable. At this moment in the conversation, I always like to introduce and kind of break it down a little bit. I call it the anatomy of a win, where I like to learn the strategy, work plan, people, operations, and results behind the win in a little bit more detail.

Your strategy doesn't include that vision and mission. that's interesting, that's distinct that you said, wait a second, we're not gonna do it the old way in strategic planning either. We're gonna have a promise and a purpose. What was the language choice there? Why was that important? And again, if you can lead me into then the strategy of this shift in approach to making dollars be more business-like, that'd be great.

Jodi Abbott (11:47.246)
Thank

Jodi Abbott (12:02.316)
Yeah, so I think promise and purpose, we, what we, and certainly I saw in my career is every time you sit down to have a mission and vision discussion, it was like, well, what's mission and what's vision? And then you get into this word smithing and you put everything down on a flip chart usually, and it changes and everybody doesn't like every word. And so we were honestly just looking for clarity. It was how do we say our promises, we are going to be an agent.

of hope and our purpose is we're going to tackle the biggest challenges we have in health to be able to transform it. Those two comments are pretty clear so people can know what is it that we're doing and are they big? Yep, they're big. But we didn't shy away from that. Now getting there was interesting. I joined the Foundation in 2020, January 2020.

right, of course, shortly after COVID hit. And I took a look at our plan and I would say we had probably more like a one page annual tactical plan on here's what we're going to achieve. And coming into the organization, I wanted to make sure that we had something incredibly aspirational, something that would push us. And so we started with a really deep analysis of who

we are. It included, you know, employee interviews. had, I report to a board so I had to make sure that I was having those conversations. So having conversations with the board. And then we did a really deep external review. And that external review was a little scary in terms of what people were saying about us. We did a brand study. We talked to government. We talked to partners and said, look, we honestly want

to know from you what we're doing well and what we're not doing well. And what came out of that was that we were going to be left behind because we weren't changing with the fast-paced world. We were in a mentality of this is how you do philanthropy and fundraising. And so with that we did two parallel processes, one building the strategy and one building what is the role of the board because we also

Jodi Abbott (14:31.856)
that the board's role needed to be able to support the new strategy, not maybe be what it was before. So we did this joint strategy and through that we created what we call our house diagram where we have our purpose and promise at the top. And then we said in order to achieve this, what do we need to do? And so the foundation of the house are our strategic enablers and we identify

five core strategic enablers that we needed to make sure were operating in the new model of the way we wanted to fundraise and deliver on the promise and purpose. the first four years of our work were highly focused on making sure that house was in order. And what we always refer to it is we're flying a plane as we're building it. And so how do we, and there's a

phenomenal video that's quite funny and we said this is how we feel like things are falling off the plane, we have to move things off the plane, etc. to get to the right place. So we built this strong foundation of strategic enablers and then we said we need four strategic imperatives and those imperatives would be the levers that we need to pull to get where we need to get. And an example of that is partnerships. We made a decision we can't do

this alone. The future is different. cannot, pardon me, excuse me, yeah you can cannot do this.

Gordon Sheppard (16:08.367)
Hang in there, you're doing okay.

Jodi Abbott (16:13.71)
alone because we're in a very, very complex health system that is sometimes feels chaotic around us. So who are the partners you need to have at the table to go arm in arm with? So those strategic imperatives, I would say now we're in year five of the plan. We are really focused on those strategic imperatives and we're saying the house is built. So yes, do we have to always have

continuous improvement for example in our technology and our people absolutely but we are we're now focused on the strategic imperatives. From that came two things really an annual scorecard that essentially is the organization scorecard and my scorecard and it is a rewards-based scorecard and it is entirely tied to the strategic plan not data

day operations. And then we rolled that scorecard down into the organization. So people are incentivized to work on things that are going to move the strategy forward rather than the day to day work, because really the day to day work should be the strategy work. So that's been some of the process that we have been in, put in place to actually build the strategy.

Gordon Sheppard (17:41.595)
Take a drink, it's well earned. I know you're coughing there for a second. That's so good. That's a masterclass in coming into the situation with your fresh eyes. There's a Jodi secret sauce in here. There's something that you're doing in the conversations as the guide, as the senior leader in this situation to manage those conversations, to change the language, to say, we're not going to do it that way. You're leading that culture shift. You've obviously done it again at other major institutions. You're bringing that.

Jodi Abbott (17:43.214)
Yes. Thank you.

Gordon Sheppard (18:10.533)
that secret sauce into this situation. can hear it super clearly. And the work that I do facilitatively in consulting, I remember one time getting lost in two hours watching a poor board try and put a comma somewhere in a mission statement. And I died a slow death. And I remember after that day, I refused to ever do that again. So this idea of challenging the language, promise, purpose, imperative, these are words that people can get into very quickly. And when you're talking about what you've done here, clearly you've created alignment and you knew you were going to do it at the top end, but you also had that vision.

that you're going to take it all the way down to the shop floor to make sure that you said you did that. And you can hear the different steps that are in there. You've built this strong house with the strong foundation. The airplane maybe is flying intact for the most part from what I can hear as opposed to the pieces falling off. So that's good. You don't need your parachutes as much now. Couldn't get a better explanation of sort of the strategy behind the why, along with a really detailed explanation that any leader listening to this could really gain a lot of inspiration from because it's slowing down. It's also allowing that this takes

You said you're in your fifth year, like that kind of change takes time in terms of getting that in place to the point though that you said your frontline workers are carrying out the strategy every day as opposed to getting stuck in the operational piece. How do you feel about that achievement?

Jodi Abbott (19:20.814)
Mm-hmm.

Jodi Abbott (19:27.362)
Well, I think it's amazing because we're, and I know this from development of strategy and making it happen. It does take time and there can be some pretty gray years where you're like, are we actually making progress? Aren't we? But what happens now is employees are looking for this and they're like, what's next? And I think one of the reasons why that happened is every organization has your values, but we actually took those values and

and put them into valued behaviors. And we talk about valued behaviors at every team meeting and ask for examples of where people are using those valued behaviors. And that I think has helped to change the culture because it is things like being a what if-ologist and it's around risk taking, which typically, you know, our organizations are not risk takers

particularly because we're dealing with donated funds and we have to be good stewards of those funds. But we're really, we're trying to get our employees to step out of their comfort zone and what they would normally have done in another charitable organization.

Gordon Sheppard (20:44.977)
And it sounds like you've the word incentives are there for everybody, from what I can hear. You've got your sort of marching orders, if you do well up against the scorecards in a sense, I'm sorry, I think you said scorecard there, but everyone's got that feel all the way down through to the point where by reinforcing, you know, on a regular basis, we're hearing that consistently from the leaders that are coming on the podcast. We are reinforcing it in as many meetings as we can, these behavior moments, and we're beyond values. You said value behaviors. Again, that.

Jodi Abbott (20:49.858)
Yes.

Jodi Abbott (21:10.093)
Yes.

Gordon Sheppard (21:11.387)
people could just push stop on the podcast right there and go back to work in their leadership role and make sure that people experience that in the meetings. So that's tremendous. It's just remarkable to hear that level of care and how long it took. And it's funny to hear you be so articulate, because on those gray days, you go to bed at night and you're like, wait a minute, you know, is this working or whatever? But here you sound quite eloquent because it's five years later, but you've put in the work and it sounds like everybody's put in the work and the communication has been done at multi-level to see it actually.

Jodi Abbott (21:36.099)
Yeah.

Gordon Sheppard (21:40.251)
coming to fruition. That's just remarkable explanation of the strategy part. Anytime we have a strategy, of course, in the second part of the anatomy of a win, we need a work plan. We need a what, who, and a when. And you said you started out with looking at what you had done before, but then on the way forward, you did a lot of analysis.

a lot of like what was going on there that would have taken time in terms of if we got the timeline out and mark those major highlights along the way then there's the creation of the plan then there's the implementation of the plan are there any out of that timeline you mentioned the four or five years any highlights that you'd like to point to and go that was these were inflection moments or important moments along the way

Jodi Abbott (22:14.306)
Well, I would say we're in one right now because we took over the last year, we took a look at our strategy, the original document and said, how are we doing? And we do that every year, but this year was, I think, particularly significant because what we said is, are we truly transforming health or are we doing clinical innovation in the space? We've always done clinical innovation. And so we took a hard look at it and said, you know what, in order to transform health,

We need to actually do that outside of the hospital environment because you will always have people coming to hospital. If we don't start to fund and pay attention to keeping people healthy in our community, we will never stop the flow of people into the hospital. So this past year we said we need a second strand of our strategy. It was always built into the strategy, but it was never fulfilled. And we said we're going to start to

in the primary care and prevention space because if we start raising funds for that and supporting people in the community to be healthy and if they're ill to keep them closer to home rather than bringing them into the hospital, we will have true health system transformation. So I would say we're right in the middle of that right now and our board approved this new strategy. We had conversations with government.

excited about us working in this area and so right now I would say that that is the inflection point.

Gordon Sheppard (23:54.733)
Again, neat thing, because if we think about it from a business perspective and we strap on the business language in a sense, you're looking at sort of where your profitability is coming from. You had to make that big sort of look in the mirror and say, what's going on here? No, we're going to go in the right direction. We got our first core business down really, really strong. We've got our foundation in our house. We're doing great. Now we're in a position to take on other, possibly call it lines of business, other ways to reach out. But because you're driven by a very clear promise,

and you know you have to fulfill on that, you're able to do it. We could talk about so many the inflection points along the way. I wish we could talk for hours, it's so good. But we've got our strategy, you explained that really, really thoroughly. We know a little bit about sort of the work plan that sort of has made this go in place. There's always people, the third step that are involved in making any win happen. And so if you could describe maybe the key players and maybe their roles, but really talk about their attitudes. Because I think if you came in and you're gonna change...

in the way that you approach the strategy and the way you do things. And people would have had old attitudes, there's a change in there. So who are the key people and how are their attitudes maybe before you got going and then how are they now?

Jodi Abbott (24:59.16)
So I would say first of all, we've actually had a change of people. And that I think happens when you do a very significant change in your strategy because you're looking for different skill sets and different attitudes. So us taking a look at our valued behaviors, we went out and recruited for people that we believe can deliver on those valued behaviors because that will be the anchor to being able to move forward.

in a very innovative and more risk related environment. we have three executive members plus myself. We have the enabling system, Chief Catalyst. So that even in the titling, you'll see it's to enable the other two executives to be successful. And that person is also the CFO. And my experience is CFOs

can be somewhat rigid in here's what's required and it's because of the training and the work area they work in and we need them to be that to be able to keep the organization safe. But we've also said we need you to enable the rest of the organization to be successful. So to do that, that CFO, traditional CFO, you're gonna have to stretch them because

It can't all be rules based on everything. And it's like, where is the gray area and where do we build in the ability to be nimble? So we have that. We have a chief catalyst of revenue generation, which in, I would say, the traditional sense is your sales team. And this is the group that is doing traditional philanthropy work. They are doing corporate sponsorship and they are trying to move forward.

new ideas. And then we created a new role and this is quite new for us in the last year, which is a chief catalyst of marketing and strategic alliances. And this is about the marketing arm of the organization and also creating the partners. And they don't just create the partners and do the marketing, they also have a revenue line so that they

Jodi Abbott (27:28.752)
they're not just spending.

they're actually required to have a target and bring funds in. So we created that new structure based on where we were at with the strategy and we are evolving it like probably every six months something evolves. And my belief is any structure can work if you have the right people. And sometimes you've got to put some things together to enable that in the best way that you can.

Gordon Sheppard (28:02.555)
So it's not just at the donor contact point, it's internal as well, right? So, and fun for me, cause I'm hearing promise and purpose. I hear catalyst and enabler. The people coming to work there would be really encouraged immediately by just simply the name changes, but there's so much significance to what that means as well. How has your own leadership internal voice evolved? I mean, you've been in leadership roles for a number of years.

So are you able to adapt to this language? Are you leading the charge on the language change? Like how is it going internally for you?

Jodi Abbott (28:35.244)
So I would say absolutely I've had to adapt. I would say over the years I was probably quite a traditional leader and I was sometimes afraid to make decisions because of the risk. I would say I'm on the opposite end of that spectrum now. I like to push the language change. I'm somebody who gets bored quite quickly. So if we're not changing, know, I think it was Drucker said, if you don't change, you die. And to me that

is it for my own career as well. That as long as I can be moving something forward and making a difference, then that's good. And I know when we pick the titles even of our executive members, there was a bit of like, you're calling them chief catalysts, like this is really weird and out there. And it's like, yep. But what we are trying to do is we are trying to differentiate ourselves. And interestingly, when you do that and you do it well,

others follow and that's a compliment and it also is somebody kind of up your back saying you better keep moving because we're going to catch you. And so being a first mover is important and being a planful first mover I think is critical.

Gordon Sheppard (29:56.613)
And how lucky to keep your own work fresh, right? Because I'm sure you've got some laurels. We could go dig them up and you could rest on them, but you're not. You're wanting to be out on the, again, you want to be in the transformational thing. And it sounds like you've got some, you want to leave it better than when you kind of got there, which is a great thing as well. That's great. So we talked about the strategy, the work plan, the people you described really well, a little bit of your own sort of experience in there. The fourth part is operationally. If we're going to make, we're going have a win. We have to have some operational components.

There may be, in this case, the strategy sort of had to evolve. There's sort of the way you operate to raise funds. There's the way the funds are sort of deployed. We've heard a bunch of those things along the way. But if you had to think about the operational side, is there any, again, highlights that we haven't covered that you would sort of throw out there to let people know about how you got this win?

Jodi Abbott (30:43.49)
Yeah, I would say that operationally and it's something that we're consistently working on is how do we become more flexible in our processes? Because when I joined the organization, we were processed light and I would say the process light was dangerous because we weren't able to fulfill maybe everything we should have been fulfilling. And what happened is we brought process in and I would say now we're process heavy. So the pendulum swung, which happens in organizations. So now

it's how do you actually if we're trying to be nimble how do we make sure that our processes are nimble and to me one of the only ways you can do that is having the people who are maybe more the back-end employees that are important in the organization have them understand what the donors needs are what the investors needs are what the corporate sponsors needs are because you can have a real gap there and that is a piece we're trying to bridge right

now to be really customer centric and not just with our external customer but our internal customers because if we've got you know our chief revenue catalyst out there trying to bring in a five million dollar donation or investment but it takes five months for us to get something done internally that will be lost because people will go to the next organization and if

those people who are managing that process don't truly understand the experience of the donor, it's pretty hard to get them to be riled up to make the change. So that is an area that I think the process piece is critically important. And given that we're bringing in a new line of business, we're right now saying what needs to change in our business model to be able to be working outside of the controlled environment of hospitals.

and really going to community, which is massive. And what does a business model need to look like so that we can be successful?

Gordon Sheppard (32:54.417)
There's what I would, if I'm putting a couple of words together, I'm gonna say agile humility. You didn't sort of get your process in place and say, well, that's the process and that's the way we do things. There's a humility in this to say, well, you know, we needed some process, so we got a lot in. wait, I think we've got too much. So you're aware again of that plane in flight that it's never kind of fully formed in a sense and you're allowing that those changes that are needed on the fly to occur. And this customer centric language, I'm a fan. Again, having done some little bit of

Jodi Abbott (32:59.692)
Mm.

Gordon Sheppard (33:23.759)
consulting work with nonprofits as well and they get stuck in those sort of old ways of doing things and that end user often gets forgotten at certain conversations. But you're saying, no, we got to dig back in and really understand them, especially when we're going out to these other areas. Wow, strategy, work plan, people, operations. Finally, there's the results. If we have a win, we have to be able to measure something qualitatively, quantitatively. What are the result highlights that you would kind of point out to people with all this big change that you made?

Jodi Abbott (33:49.964)
Well, I would say first of all, financial results because our job is to generate revenue and we're coming out of one of the best financial years in our history, which is amazing, which means all of the other components are working to get us to the point where we can actually have those financial results. I think the other is is actual health results because we want to be able to influence health and you know, an initiative we've been working on with

artists, so one of the largest pharma companies in the world, ourselves and the government of Alberta, we were able to look at something called ASCVD, which is essentially clogged arteries. And shockingly, there are 400,000 Albertans that have clogged arteries. that typically is has we've learned that because they've had a cardiac event. And we know that with a second cardiac event, almost

almost certainly you won't have a good outcome, so you won't be with us. And we have done an initiative with these partners where we have been able to decrease the risk of cardiovascular, another cardiac event, by increasing lipid control. So we've gone right into pharmacies and primary care offices and we have data that is showing that we're getting people on the right medicine.

to be able to reduce the impact and the risk of them having a second cardiac event. That to me is about what transformation and health is about because it's about creating better lives for Albertans and saving lives for Albertans. So what's interesting about our work is yes we have the traditional metrics of you know financial metrics, people metrics, but we also have something pretty special that we can say as a result of the

intervention that we are funding, we're actually keeping Albertans healthier and alive.

Gordon Sheppard (35:56.945)
Partnering in the cutting edge of Alzheimer's research, heard today. Partnering in helping people in cardiac events. I was hitting your website, there's about, I'm sure 10 other areas we would talk about where you're having major impacts in the way that you can. And now this thing of prevention in the community is also a big part of that second line that you're going along the way. Wow, that's just, anyway, what a pleasure to speak with you and hear about your leadership journey and then the journey of your entire gang to get to.

ultimately raising more money and having a bigger impact on Albertans. Is there something you'd like to say about this to put a bow on it? Is there a few sentences that you can put together to wrap this up for us?

Jodi Abbott (36:34.53)
Yeah, I would say to any leader, be bold. You will doubt yourself along the way. But if you actually have that good strategic plan and you just put your head down, particularly in chaos, I mean, we're living in chaos right now in health, put your head down and keep to your plan. It matters and you will see the results.

Gordon Sheppard (36:58.267)
Super inspiring to have you on. Dr. Abbott, thank you so much for being on the show.

Jodi Abbott (37:03.234)
Very happy to be here. Thanks so much, Gordon.