DRRN External Partner Highlights: Maddy Laberge

1. Could you introduce yourself and tell us about your current work or projects?

I work for Health Emergency Management BC as the manager for Vancouver Coastal Health and Providence Health Care. Our team supports the healthcare system to plan, prepare for, and respond to emergencies and disasters, ranging from small, localized incidents to large regional, provincial, and national events across public health, hospitals, long term care, and community programs. I have supported numerous complex healthcare responses to extreme weather related disasters, including the 2021 BC heat dome, multiple severe winter storms, floods, evacuations, prolonged drought conditions, and increasingly intense wildfire seasons.

I began my career in healthcare as a respiratory therapist before stumbling into emergency management through an interim educator role. That experience sparked a lasting interest and led me to pursue a Master’s degree in Emergency and Disaster Management. Nearly a decade ago, I formally transitioned into health emergency management and have not looked back. I have spoken and published frequently on emergency and disaster related topics, with a particular focus on healthcare systems and chronic disease management. I believe that in a system where we are all underfunded and overworked, the only way we make meaningful progress is by sharing our work and learning from one another.

Like most emergency management teams, we are always working on more projects, tools and initiatives than we can reasonably manage. I do want to highlight a recent milestone, the completion of the Provincial Mass Casualty Project, led by the incredible Gloria Hertz and Dr. Chris Lee. This initiative was established to enhance the acute care health system’s readiness to respond to mass casualty events across British Columbia. Its primary objectives were to strengthen preparedness through the development of standardized tools and frameworks, clarify emergency response structures and roles, improve patient tracking and information sharing, and ensure responses are patient centered, evidence informed, and risk based.

2. What motivated you to want to connect with the DRRN?

Like most of us, I believe breaking down silos across emergency management is essential, but this work also needs to extend beyond our field into areas such as climate change, planetary health, engineering, and beyond. Even within healthcare emergency management, we continue to struggle with silos, within our own organizations, and we need to do a better job of bridging gaps across academia, government, and practitioners.

Being part of the DRRN keeps me connected to ongoing research and provides a way to share and evaluate our active project work through an academic lens. For example we are always open to research partners to help evaluate the impact of the Intra and Inter Health Authority Relocation (IIHAR) toolkit, which includes tools and resources that facilitate patient relocation from a site or community-level event, across all phases of preparation, evacuation, transportation, reception, and repatriation, using a patient centered, culturally safe, and risk based approach with a focus on those most vulnerable. If that sounds interesting, hit me up (worth noting there is no funding, but there is real world impact and a group of people who believe deeply in this work, and built the toolkit directly from hard lessons and a bit of personal trauma following some less than ideal evacuations in 2021 and then seeing its positive impact when implemented during the 2023 evacuations).

3. What do you wish others, especially academic researchers, understood better about your work? What key insights would you like to share?

We would love to publish more and do more research, but the reality is that we lack the time, resources, and funding. This is not a challenge unique to us and is, honestly, a pretty common theme these days. Our teams have largely stayed the same size, and in some cases have even shrunk, while climate change has dramatically increased the number, frequency, and complexity of events we are responding to. That said, please come talk to us about what we are doing and where we think research is most needed.

Projects like IIHAR are a great example. It is an incredible toolkit and has won awards, but we need academic evidence to truly demonstrate its impact. We simply do not have the capacity or funding to do that work on our own, so genuinely, hit me up.

We often operate in a “good enough” environment. While we would love to meet gold standards (policy, academic etc.)  across everything we do, that is not realistic. When recommendations are made, whether from academia or elsewhere, it is incredibly helpful to have them clearly categorized and prioritized, from essential or foundational “must do” actions to “nice to have” options that may not be feasible given workload and funding constraints.

4. What future developments in disaster resilience research are you most interested in or concerned about?

Of course this includes healthcare emergency management (see IIHAR), but I am also really interested in innovative, low cost ways to use technology to support expanding response demands with stagnant or shrinking resources, and low cost, easy to implement ways to make healthcare infrastructure more climate change related disaster resilient (aren’t we all these days? maybe dreaming big, but it’s worth asking).