Culture Conference

Dr. Danièle Behn Smith is Métis from the Red River Valley and Eh Cho Dene from Fort Nelson First Nation. She has the honour and privilege of working as British Columbia’s Deputy Provincial Health Officer, Indigenous Health. She works alongside Dr. Bonnie Henry and other team members at the Office of the Provincial Health Officer to uphold the inherent rights of Indigenous peoples, unlearn and undo systemic white supremacy and racism and advance true reconciliation.

Behn Smith brings expertise as a family physician with training in emergency medicine (MD, CCFP-EM); functional medicine (Certified Functional Medicine Practitioner); and population and public health (MPH). She has practiced medicine in rural and remote Indigenous communities across Canada.

As both a physician and health leader, her work recognizes self-determination as the foundation of health and wellness among First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples, and the importance of Indigenous approaches and healing systems.

Dr. Joanna (Jo) Cheek (she/her) is a Canadian psychiatrist and award-winning clinical professor of medicine at the University of British Columbia. She is a mental health speaker and advocate, meditation teacher, and psychotherapist trained in numerous styles of therapy. She is the author of the Globe and Mail bestselling book IT’S NOT YOU, IT’S THE WORLD: A Mental Health Survival Guide for Us All (HarperCollins Canada).

She co-founded Mind Space, a collective of physicians across British Columbia offering publicly-funded mental health groups to tens of thousands of participants as part of her advocacy to improve mental health equity and access to services. She has specific interests in mental health and wellness education, social psychiatry, collective & community care, systems change & quality improvement, group facilitation, trauma, neurodiversity, and cultural humility, equity, diversity, and inclusivity (CHEDI).

She sees mental health struggles as symptoms of the imbalances in our wider systems, hoping to decrease the stigma that is too often misplaced on the individuals who suffer rather than the ailing society around them.

Dr. Renee Fernandez is a family physician and health system leader known for bringing people together to tackle some of healthcare’s most difficult challenges.

As a senior physician leader with BC Family Doctors, she led the design and implementation of the Longitudinal Family Physician Payment Model, reshaping how family medicine is supported across British Columbia. Since its introduction, the model has contributed to the recruitment of more than 1,000 longitudinal family physicians and the attachment of more than 600,000 patients.

Her leadership work has taught her about the importance of the human side of healthcare transformation: how culture, relationships, trust, and psychological safety influence whether people can speak openly, work through disagreement, and create meaningful change.

She is known for a candid, thoughtful, and relationship-centred approach to leadership. She believes meaningful change depends not only on good ideas, but on creating the conditions where people feel able to contribute, challenge assumptions, learn from one another, and stay connected to purpose.

Alongside her health system work, she continues to practice family medicine with a focus on sexual and reproductive health.

Dr. Marcus Greatheart, CCFP, MSW, RSW, is a family physician, registered social worker and addiction medicine leader based on Vancouver Island.

His work spans street medicine, hospital-based addiction care, outreach, health-system leadership, education and writing. He works primarily with people experiencing homelessness, substance use and mental illness, and with the teams and systems responsible for their care.

Much of his work sits where care and constraint collide: when workers know what people need but the available system cannot reliably provide it.

He writes and teaches about practical frontline care, difficult conversations, sustainable practice, leadership and the responsibilities of healthcare systems toward people who experience exclusion and discrimination.

He is the author of The Field Guide to Frontline Care and speaks with healthcare, social-service and community organizations across Canada, the US and internationally.

Kate Jongbloed, PhD (she/her) is a white occupier living on the territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.

She is an epidemiologist and mixed methods health researcher with 15+ years of experience documenting and responding to the impacts of settler colonialism on health and wellness.

She serves as the co-Principal Investigator of the “Unlearning & Undoing White Supremacy and Indigenous-Specific Racism Lab” (U&U Lab), alongside Dr. Danièle Behn Smith from the BC Office of the Provincial Health Officer.

Her other roles are: Senior Scientist at the BC Centre for Disease Control; Adjunct Professor at University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy; and Associate with Qoqoq Consulting Ltd.