All of our Laureates are people who saw potential even where others did not; they are innovators willing to try new things. Some of these Laureates did so long ago, pushing boundaries despite great challenges to create landscapes for learning and improvement to health and health care in ways we take for granted today.

The presence of women in medicine, particularly in surgery and as physicians, can be traced to earliest human history. However, it was only at the start of the 20th century that most countries began to provide women with equal access to medical education and subsequent practice.  Our women CMHF Laureates have helped, and continue to help, pave the way for future generations of women health heroes in Canada.

How we train and educate our health care providers and researchers has evolved as much as science has. Whether it is developing an academic specialty, creating new standards for training, building our learning institutions, or expanding the breadth of learning to include clinical research, CMHF Laureates in this area have profoundly impacted future generations of health scientists, scholars and clinicians.

The World Health Organization (WHO) defines health policy as the “decisions, plans, and actions that are undertaken to achieve specific health care goals within a society.”  Health policy sets the foundation for the delivery of safe and cost effective quality care and shapes the entire health care landscape at all levels – institutional and geographic, patient and provider.

Building capacity in health organizations, forming new ones, and inspiring institutional change  and collaboration to achieve greater effectiveness are just some of the ways these change-makers have improved health in Canada and the world.  

Many Laureates have been expressly concerned with the human side of medicine and health care. The arts and humanities deepen our understanding of the body, health, medicine, illness, suffering, disability and the provision of health care.