At Home With VHA: Meet Jillian Chandler, Regional Director, Toronto Central Region
Every role at VHA contributes to something amazing. At Home with VHA tells the stories of those who make up VHA Home HealthCare.
Meet Jillian Chandler, who joined VHA in June 2024 as our new Regional Director, Integrated Client and Community Care for the Toronto Central Region.
Tell us a little bit about your background and what brought you to VHA?
I am a Registered Nurse and started my career at University Health Network (UHN) on their internal float team. This role involved transitioning between different medical and surgical hospital units as needed, which was a great way to gain varied clinical experience quickly. It also gave me insight into the impact clinical management and leadership can have on team morale and ultimately the quality of care being delivered. The opportunity to participate in a UHN Fellowship Program for point-of-care staff further piqued my interest in the administrative and leadership side of nursing and I was inspired to go back to school to do a Masters of Health Administration.
Following my Masters, I continued my work at UHN as a Clinical Manager at the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute which allowed me to get the management experience I had been looking for along with the opportunity to lead a number of quality improvement initiatives. I then pivoted to support UHN’s transition to a new electronic health record as part of the Clinical Informatics team, but I started to really miss the connection with patients and families and the care delivery side of nursing.
It was at that time that the opportunity with VHA Home HealthCare (VHA) came up. A few of my former colleagues had started working with VHA and I had heard a lot about the innovative work and new models of care being implemented within the home care sector. During my years working in hospitals, I often heard from patients how much they wanted to be at home. Our hospitals simply do not have the capacity to meet the care needs of Ontarians and we know that these demands will only increase with time. This role felt like a great chance to apply my clinical and leadership strengths to another care setting and to be a part of a sector that is an essential part of our health system.
VHA provides a lot of service in the Toronto Central region. It has a large team of providers and several community partnerships. Can you explain what is involved in your unique role?
As Regional Director, I’m responsible for overseeing all of VHA’s operations within the Toronto Central region. This includes working with managers, care team supervisors and point-of-care providers to make sure that we are providing high quality, person-centred care, resolving concerns and fulfilling our obligations to funders. Within Toronto Central, there are a number of programs we have in partnership with hospitals and other organizations, such as our Transitional Care Program with Michael Garron Hospital, the Kew Beach Unit. These programs involve a lot of collaboration and teamwork as well as responding to the unique challenges that arise.
In addition to making sure everything runs smoothly across the region day-to-day, there are also the big picture conversations I have with senior management and community partners. How will home care changes across the province impact our clients and providers and how can we continue to innovate to make our care even better? This blend of operations and strategy is such an exciting part of the job for me.
What have been your initial goals or priorities during your first few months at VHA?
Because Toronto Central covers such a massive and populated area, it is difficult to meet the volume of visits and referrals that come through to us. The demand is particularly high for our personal support and occupational therapy services. Increasing staffing and support to meet these needs has been an area of focus for me since stepping into this role.
I think one of the most important parts of this role is to make sure my team feels supported. Working on such a large team and independently in the community can be difficult and isolating at times for our providers. I want my team to feel that they have the whole organization and a supportive structure behind them.
Now that you’ve been in the role for a few months, what excites you most about your position and the work that VHA is doing?
From day one, the supportive and team-focused culture at VHA has really stood out to me. I feel like I can reach out to anyone and they’re happy to assist. It’s such a positive environment and that’s been really helpful.
And it feels like there are so many exciting initiatives in the works. There’s a lot of transition and innovation that I think will have a real impact on the future of home care to make care even better for our clients and our providers.
Is there anything else you’d like to share, maybe about your life outside of work?
I’m from the Maritimes, grew up in Nova Scotia and moved to Toronto for nursing. Outside of work, I have a 15-year-old son and am an avid long-distance runner. Fitness is really important to me and has always helped me balance the stress of work and life demands.
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