Environmental sustainability is increasingly recognized as a strategic imperative for healthcare leadership, but progress often unfolds in silos. While hospitals and health organizations across Canada take meaningful steps to reduce emissions, there remains limited coordination at the provincial level to align standards, measure outcomes, and drive collective accountability.
In this session, Mary Lynn VanTassel, Executive Lead for Health System Sustainability at IWK Health, and Dr. Brittany Barber, Postdoctoral Fellow and sustainability researcher, will share insights from IWK Health’s journey toward embedding environmental sustainability into its operations and strategy.
Together, they will explore how one tertiary care centre’s initiatives, including establishing a sustainability portfolio and targeting high impact areas in pharmacy, reveal critical gaps in provincial system-level coordination. Dr. Barber will discuss how decentralized standards hinder measurement of clinical and operational emissions, especially in pharmacy. Mary Lynn will draw on her experience participating on provincial and national sustainability boards / forums / communities of practice to discuss what is needed to bridge institutional efforts and establish consistent standards across healthcare systems.
This webinar will challenge participants to consider how hospitals, government, suppliers, and policymakers can move beyond isolated efforts to foster coordinated, scalable, and measurable climate action.
This session is ideal for healthcare executives, clinical leaders, and operational teams, offering practical insights and inspiration for navigating inter-institutional barriers and building a unified path toward environmentally sustainable healthcare.
Featured Speakers:
Dr. Brittany Barber is a Mitacs Elevate Postdoctoral Fellow working between IWK and QEII, exploring strategies to advance environmentally sustainable pharmacy practice in Nova Scotia. Brittany recently completed a CIHR Health System Impact Postdoctoral Fellow with IWK, where she played a key role in integrating evidence to shape the organization’s environmental sustainability strategy. With formal training in health geography, behavior change, and health system transformation, Brittany brings an interdisciplinary approach to tackling complex healthcare challenges. Her research focuses on embedding sustainability into health systems by improving the implementation of data-driven, rapid-learning frameworks. She is passionate about driving meaningful change toward environmentally sustainable, learning health systems.
Mary Lynn VanTassel, CPA, CA is the Executive Lead of Health System Sustainability at IWK Health, where she leads embedding sustainability into healthcare operations and plays a key role in aligning IWK’s strategy with provincial transformation efforts. Her portfolio also includes Environmental Services and Waste Management.
Before assuming her current position, Mary Lynn held several key leadership roles at IWK Health, including Director of Financial Services & Treasury and Acting Chief Operating Officer (COO). During her time as Acting COO, she co-led the strategic initiative focused on environmental sustainability, which sparked her passion for sustainability and played a pivotal role in the creation of the Health System Sustainability portfolio in September 2024. Before joining IWK Health, she spent 12 years in various financial and operational leadership positions at McInnes Cooper.
Mary Lynn holds a BBA from St. Francis Xavier University and earned her Chartered Accountancy (CA) designation in 1999. She is also an active community leader, currently serving on the boards of the North End Community Health Center (where she is also the Chair, Financial Oversight and Risk Committee) and the Nova Scotia Chapter of the Financial Management Institute (FMI).
FEES: FREE
