• 01 Jul, 2024
• Dr. Julie Wilson

Proactive Healthcare: Dr. Julie Wilson on Building a Better System, One Clinic at a Time

Magazica: Welcome, everyone. Today we are thrilled to have Dr. Julie Wilson with us. A family physician, entrepreneur, and a trailblazer in healthcare innovation, Dr. Wilson is the founder of Terranova Medical Clinics. Her dedication is compassionate and her efforts to create quality improvement have touched over 50,000 lives, earning her numerous accolades, including being named one of WXN Canada’s 100 Most Powerful Women and a three-time Stevie Award winner. Dr. Wilson is a name synonymous with healthcare. Dr. Wilson, welcome to Magazica.

Dr. Julie Wilson: Thank you so much for having me. It’s my pleasure.

Magazica: We will start by understanding your very excellent journey. Can you share your journey from being a family physician to becoming an entrepreneur and founding Terranova? What motivated you throughout this journey?

Dr. Julie Wilson: Oh, yes, of course. I decided to go into family medicine when I was a medical student, something I’ve always wanted to do. Even though at the time people used to always ask, “Why family medicine? Why aren’t you specializing?” I knew that I wanted to have that long-term relationship with my patients, get to know them, and be that doctor who can handle anything rather than just one small thing. So, I decided to go into family medicine. But back then, here in BC, my experience with family medicine was very traditional. It was maybe one or two doctors in a single office. They would have maybe one or two secretaries who’d been there for 30 years; the office wouldn’t be well decorated, be kind of dingy, the chairs would be cracked, and everything would be on paper.

Both my husband and I, we were in medical school at the same time, different medical schools. But we matched to Toronto to do our Family Medicine Residency, and for us, that was very illuminating. It was a huge change in what we could have here in BC. Because they had these family health teams which are not new to them. But we have just started to develop something similar here, where we have allied healthcare professionals working with the family physicians, teams of family physicians—10, 20, 30, 50. Our clinics that we did our residency in related to the hospital. So you could page a specialist or get an MRI the same day if you really needed to. You were connected to the whole hospital system.

And you had well-paid staff who were competent and able to do very complex things. And you didn’t need to do what we had to do in BC, which is, if you were sick, or if you needed a vacation, you had to get a locum. So, you had to hire someone to come on exactly the dates that you were not able to come, which is very difficult to do because you could have cross-coverage. Someone else would see your patients, and everything was on the computer or in the cloud. So, there was no paper.

We came back to BC at the end of Residency and thought, well, we can’t go back to this old system. So, we rented a larger space, built a clinic with nine exam rooms rather than just two for two doctors, and we thought, we’re going to do something like this now. Back then there was no primary care network where they had the allied healthcare providers. It was still that old-fashioned system, but we put everything in the cloud. We collaborated with a few other doctors. We had about four or five doctors, and we started our cross-coverage system, which was, you know, not as comprehensive as it was in Toronto, but still quite good.

And we went on like that until the pandemic. Then, during the pandemic, what ended up happening was with difficulty with hiring, minimum wage going up, which didn’t raise all wages, crazy inflation, medical supplies becoming difficult to access and much more expensive. You’ll have seen that many medical clinics closed. But before, you could be only okay at business and have a medical clinic. After that, you had to become good at business, which many of us were not.

So, I got my own what I call my own personal MBA. I read over 50 business books. I did lots of practice quality improvement projects, worked with the division of family practice, the primary care networks which had opened, and completely transformed how I went from family doctor, who happened to own a clinic, to entrepreneur.

And then with that, I discovered, I could do a lot more good doing that than just as a family doctor, because as a family doctor, I was taking care of my patients, which was so wonderful. But at that time, because so many clinics closed, our clinic went from 25,000 patients to 50,000 in two years.

Magazica: Oh, wow!

Dr. Julie Wilson: And how do you deal with that? How do you manage the health of all those people, making sure they have your preventative healthcare, get to see someone in a timely fashion? That’s very difficult. So, I threw my whole heart and energy into that, and I wanted to do it properly, ethically, compassionately, for everyone involved. So, we did things like add extended medical dentals for all the staff, raise their wages, we added 100% top-up maternity paternity leave for one year.

There was supposed to be something called pandemic pay, where the government was going to pay them an extra $4 an hour, and then they decided last minute to not do it for outpatient. I paid them that out of my own pocket. I tried to do things where I think, “Where will I look back and feel that I was a good person, that I don’t want to have any regrets?” And that’s what I did.

Magazica: It’s a fascinating journey. You have contained the ocean in a cup about your whole ten to eleven years of journey, and your whole residency, and before that your whole medical school training and everything. Nothing works better than your live experience. It’s always better the confidence that you are showing in this description of such a journey.

Dr. Julie Wilson: Oh, thank you. You know, I think it’s like you learn something, and you immediately implement it. Like practicing as you go.

Magazica: Any specific one or two things that inspired you to transcend the traditional medical clinic model and create this. I’ll call this like a nexus of one-stop solution, or a type of medical excellence. I’m a big fan of Brené Brown. This compassionate word which I immediately like. So, what are the one or two things that inspired you to shift from this traditional medical clinic model, and this nexus of medical excellence and compassionate care.

Dr. Julie Wilson: Honestly, I think it was frustration. Because what I wanted was to have a good job, and I want people around me to have a good job, and I want the patients to have a good experience. And just with the way the system was that wasn’t happening. And I thought, Well. It’s not that hard to do of every new entrepreneur. Thinks it’s not that hard to do. Of course, it’s extremely hard, but. You know you jump into it. You get started, and then you just keep fixing things one at a time, and it gives you a bit of a rush. Oh, I fix that now that’s better. And then you just keep doing it times ten thousand. And then suddenly, you’re where you want to be.

Magazica: Tell us a bit more about your dream project. Not in exact in an operational sense, but kind of in a mission-vision statement. You can go to operation as well. How does Terranova was innovated and elevated?

Dr. Julie Wilson: That’s a great question, because that’s something I’ve been currently working on. So, I’m trying to do this new thing which is not done anywhere else in BC. That I know, but I’m sure it’s done in other locations in the world is I’m trying to make all my clinics talk to each other. So, my vision is to build a network of clinics so that we are essentially one overall organizational structure and clinic with multiple locations. So that way we can service people where they are just saying in Langley or Squamish, but rather than those patients only having the power of two or three doctors or nurse practitioners to care for them. They have the power of the entire team and the entire administrative staff. So, if the IT goes down, we have an IT person, which then improves the care for the people in that Langley clinic who could otherwise not afford such a high-level employee or admin staff. Or if those doctors are full, you know, during flu season it can be very full. Well, we’ll have somebody in Richmond or Vancouver who might be able to talk to those patients on the phone at the very least, or if they can, if the person is traveling, they could be seen in person at the other clinic.

Dr. Julie Wilson: And then everything that happened would be in the chart. They would be able to read the patient’s entire history, which would provide what we call continuity of care rather than at a walk-in where they say, “What are your problems?” and they’re trying to get everything done in a 10-minute period. They’ll be able to read everything, and then your primary care provider would be able to look back and see what was done, see all the tests and the results. That is my vision for what I’m doing, and I want to continue to expand that. It obviously has excellent benefits for the patients as well as for the staff because it allows career progression. One reason that medical clinics often don’t have good staff is that it’s a dead-end job. You just sort of get that job, and then that’s it. Whereas we can have people move up within the ranks of the organization, and that improves the quality of care. The other benefit is to the healthcare providers because, again, that just improves their cross-coverage and also gets other ideas. When your patient sees another doctor or nurse practitioner, you get their opinion on things, right? So we can get sick, have a baby, go on vacation again. These things sound very basic to other people, but these are things that were not possible for family doctors before.

And one thing I also do is add as many technologies as I can to make it possible. There are not that many technologies available in Canada, but whenever it comes out, I always give it a try. For example, right now, we’re trying AI eFax management so that things can get uploaded quickly into the chart. So, you’re not waiting half a day for a chest X-ray or some other report to come in. We’re working on that. But we have other technologies where you can email the patient confidentially straight from the chart, send them their results. Also, we switched to e-faxing so that nothing ever gets lost. It’s all straight to the computer. We’ve done things so that everything is in the cloud so that if you’re working from home or remotely, you can be just as effective as if you were personally in the clinic. Right? We have online booking, billing supports, you name it. As long as it’s available, I add it to the clinic. And again, that improves patient care, right? Because everything is done by a human being. There’s a certain error rate.

Magazica: One of our professors used to say that AI is not exactly artificial intelligence. It is advancing intelligence.

Dr. Julie Wilson: That’s right. See?

Magazica: So, your services are hugely added by this AI thing. It’s really fascinating. Trust me, you are one of the first doctors in Canada we are speaking to that has already incorporated AI. You are the first.

Dr. Julie Wilson: Oh, really? Well, we have AI for lots of things. We have AI recall the patients, so it knows when to recall the patient. It messages them at a certain interval that we’ve specified, and it knows that the patient is booked back, and if they haven’t booked back, then it keeps messaging them to make sure that you don’t just call them once, and that’s it. You make sure that they book back to make sure it’s done, and the AI monitors that. Other things we do is offer to everyone AI note-making services because if you’ve ever been to a doctor where they’re typing and typing and typing, and they can’t even look at you. Well, it’s hard to switch your attention back and forth, but they don’t have time to go after and type. So, what I do is have, you know, they’re legal, they’re confidential, but they listen. The AI listens to it, writes the whole note for you, so you can just talk to the patient and focus on them and do better, more compassionate care. And I give that to everyone too.

Magazica: As you said, entrepreneurship sounds very easy but is hard to do. So, what are some of the challenges that you’ve faced while expanding Terranova medical clinics, and how did you overcome them? Whatever you want to share, please.

Dr. Julie Wilson: Well, you know, there are lots of things that each, as you know, you learned HR, right? A person can’t just go hire someone and be as good as someone who learned about HR, right? But we think we are at first, and we learn over time. We must make this adjustment. We must make this protocol. So, each thing that we learned, each thing that just say that there is a degree for, I had to learn separately, like HR, marketing, IT, etc. All those things we had to learn from scratch, right? Each was a complex and long journey. And another thing is, it’s not like we run on high margins, you know. We don’t have the money to necessarily call someone in to fix a printer if we must. We do, but sometimes it costs us 500 to a thousand dollars, and that’s our entire profit for the month, right? Especially when we’re getting started. So, there are lots of times, just like any business, right? You’re losing money, but you have to keep the faith that it will get better.

Magazica: I think you can envelope all the skills and everything, and all the journey in my idea is resilience. We have to be very resilient. We have to have a shock-absorbing mechanism. Because at the very beginning, whatever you do, it comes back to you, and most of the time it doesn’t produce the result.

Dr. Julie Wilson: That’s right.

Magazica: You have to absorb those shocks. Sometimes it is very tough. So, what are the practical strategies for? I’m talking from the patient’s perspective or the service who are having the service from you, or what are having the medical advice from you? What are some practical strategies usually like in a very nutshell. Our readers are coming from all cohorts and all demographic sections, so practical strategies for maintaining good health that our readers can incorporate into their daily lives like really like.

Dr. Julie Wilson: Everybody’s health is different, so it depends on their personal health conditions, but very generally, you know, exercise at least a hundred fifty minutes a week of moderate intensity, or greater, is recommended to prevent heart attacks and strokes. Also, it will make you feel less tired. We have a chronic fatigue problem, I think.

Not chronic fatigue particularly, but people are chronically tired. They’re chronically not sleeping well I see this in my day-to-day practice. So, I would say, sleep hygiene, and sleep protection. I tell all my patients you show up for work on time. Why don’t you show up for yourself on time and go to bed at the right time, right?

Magazica: Yeah.

Dr. Julie Wilson: So, you don’t say, oh, I had to do my dishes, so I didn’t show up to work on time, but you’ll say that for yourself, and not go to sleep right?

Those sorts of things otherwise I would say, keep your preventative care up to date. That, I think, has been very lacking in family medicine, even though it is our mandate. It’s because we’re so tired and busy with all the appointments. We’re so backed up. It’s hard to take time to say you’re due for your bone mineral density scan, and you’re due for your stool sample, and that often gets behind. And I find people don’t have a strong awareness of their frequency of preventative care treatments and which ones are recommended.

That’s one thing I’m very proud of. I personally hired a nurse out of my own funding, and I got her to catch up all my patients on preventative care, but it’s a very rare thing to do. So, I would recommend that for patients for cancer prevention. So that would be mainly mammograms, stool samples and colonoscopies, pap smears.

And then, of course, vaccinations. Most people are behind on their tetanus vaccine, their HPV vaccines, pneumonia vaccines, shingles vaccines, those sorts of things.

Magazica: That’s great. Because this I didn’t know this term that 150 minutes per week. It sounds very logical. Even if I divided 30 minutes slots, it’s 5 days a week.

Dr. Julie Wilson: That’s right.

Magazica: Let’s unpack this idea a bit more. That one thing in the medical service is that as a patient I’m having the medical advice for my disease, or for my ailments that I’m having. But another part. Is that what you have just said? Can you just please stretch on that point a bit. It sounds very fascinating. Can you share some of the success stories like very.

Dr. Julie Wilson: Oh, yeah. Well, you know we have. There are preventative care guidelines. And back in the day, you know, when I first started, we did have more time with patients because there wasn’t such a demand for appointments, and you would see the patient. They would come in with a cough or cold, and while you were there, you’d be looking through the chart, and you’d say, hey I noticed you’re behind on this test or that, and let’s talk about it. And then people were generally quite caught up through that chaos method, right? But it happened now.

There’s such a shortage of family doctors and nurse practitioners that when you come in it’s just so hurried that the doctor generally doesn’t have time to go through your whole chart and see what you’re missing, and I find that people can be quite behind. So, what I’ve done is I’ve trained my staff. I’ve trained my nurses. I’ve trained myself to make those adjustments, to make sure that it’s done. Now, some of the success stories I’ve had would be essentially for all these cancer screenings I have caught so many pre-cancers and cancers by just saying, hey, I noticed you’re overdue for your mammogram. Do you think you could do that?

I notice you’re overdue for your stool sample so many. Recently I started catching up on my bone mineral density scans for my patients, and we called everybody. We went through thousands of charts. We did it a chart review that took probably hundreds of hours right, and we went through them.

And I have in the past year caught probably 50 cases of osteoporosis in my patients that otherwise would have been undiagnosed. And that just took a lot of will and time and resilience, and the belief that it was important to do that. But otherwise, it just doesn’t happen organically the way it used to. Although I think it’s getting better with a new payment model for family doctors. You’re also paid for administration time. So, I think doctors may be spending more time able to do that chart review and spend more time with patients.

Magazica: Sounds really fascinating. And your conversation on this thing just reminded me. Prevention is always better than cure.

Dr. Julie Wilson: That’s right. Yeah.

Magazica: Let’s like go to a bit more different direction right now, because we’ll come back to it again. From your profile and from your LinkedIn posts, it seems that you read a lot.

Dr. Julie Wilson: Yes, I love to read.

Magazica: What are some of the books that you suggest? Maybe on health, maybe on overall.

Dr. Julie Wilson: It depends on what you’re looking for. I mean one book that I tell everyone is crucial conversations, a very simple book, but we all have conversations all the time. And it basically is, I tell most people a life-changing book teaching you how to just get through difficult conversations and move forward right and interpersonal relationships cause people a lot of stress. I would say do that a lot. And that kind of stress affects their health. Right? People, sick leave. They have to leave work, they feel unwell. So that’s one thing. I have so many books that I love a great one for depression and anxiety would be mind over mood is recommended.

Magazica: Sounds fantastic.

Dr. Julie Wilson: I recently read one called Rewire your anxious brain, and it goes into the base, the chemical basis of anxiety, and I think it helps patients a lot to know where it’s coming from now for general health. I do not think I have found one good general health book, saying, this is how often you should do this, and this is how much you should exercise. I find a lot of them are very opinion-based.

Magazica: Maybe in coming times, managing your all your like engagement and everything. You should plan to write one.

Dr. Julie Wilson: Yeah.

Magazica: You are in a like a unique position to write it. So maybe like, make it in a very include it in your bucket list.

Dr. Julie Wilson: Yeah, okay, I’ll put that on my bucket list, and I’ll just Amazon self-publish or something and give it out to people. Well, you know, BC Has done a great job with their government health websites. I don’t know that like I usually just search it. But they have a lot of health information online. And I find that that’s a great resource for patients as well. All of that information is available on their various websites.

Magazica: Our readers in BC, please listen to Dr. Wilson, please, and go to BC website, government website. Thank you for the input that these are the information that our readers are from across Canada. So, they’ll be helpful.

Dr. Julie Wilson: In general, the guidelines are slightly different from location to location, but they’re broadly the same right? So, I would say. Probably each province would have it. But even if not, even if you’re reading from Manitoba, you could look and look at the BC. Website, I’m sure you would find it very helpful.

Magazica: You have already touched our next question, and how like, in a very briefly, how does technology play in your clinic? You have talked about AI and has it improved patient care, one or two different dimensions, if you like to mention.

Dr. Julie Wilson: There’s a number of things that have been huge problems, in my personal opinion, in healthcare. One is that we must use faxes. Fax is confidential, but it also means that many things get lost. So, when you’re changing the toner, the fax that would be coming in at that time often goes missing. Many years ago, I switched to e-faxing, and I think many clinics have slowly started to do this over time, but we’ve all heard from patients that the hospital didn’t receive that requisition, my specialist didn’t get the referral. It’s quite common for these things to go missing. But as a family doctor, you get every report and every result that ever happens to any of your patients. So, if any of that goes missing, you could miss a cancer diagnosis. So, technology, I think, has come a long way to reduce a lot of those errors that can be quite dangerous.

So that’s important. Other things, our patients are way more educated than they used to be. They want to be educated, too. So, when they get reports, they often want to have a copy. Now, you can get your life labs results online, etc., but not everything you can get online on your own. So you have to go talk to your family doctor to get it. We used to just print things and give it to them, which was not only a waste of paper but had a risk of being lost, and that confidentiality would be lost. So one thing I’ve added is confidential emailing straight from the chart. So you can send them all that information, you can write them notes, and it’s confidential. And then they have it in their own system, right? So they can’t lose it.

And as I said, the AI makes a huge difference when I can look my patient in the eye the entire visit. It changes your experience to the point that previously I felt overworked and stressed out and lack of human connection during my patient appointments. And now that is back, and I feel much more connected and much more human, and I’m sure they feel that as well.

Magazica: Whenever you’re saying to look at the patient for a longer period of time makes a huge difference. As a patient, I cannot say how important it is whenever I see my doctor is paying attention to whatever I’m saying. As a patient, it’s very, very important for me. So, thank you very much for sharing that. What are your insights?

Dr. Julie Wilson: Well, technology and medicine is a hot topic. Everybody wants it right. We often say that doctors will be replaced by AI, and a lot of people feel sad about that. I say, please give me an AI that does all the work. I just talk to the patient. And then I say, Yeah, AI, you did a good job. Thank you. But you know, I think that the technologies for medicine, they’re going to be coming hot and fast, and I’m excited for them now. The key with them is rather than them just appearing. We actually need them to be legally certified in each country, right or each jurisdiction so like in Canada, so it has to be, have special things like it has to have certain confidentiality requirements, and depending on what it is, you know it has to. It has to be perfectly robust, right? Like you can’t have a certain error rate that you might have in other industries.

If you get an eFax or AI like we tried, for example, an AI eFax management. But its error rate was something like 5% because we were having a human check it. And we said, Okay, we have to stop and wait until technology gets better, because that needs to be close to 0% in medicine. Right? So there are certain things that make it more difficult than other industries. But, on the other hand, I think there’s so much drive to do it that in the next 5, 10 years, medicine is going to become unrecognizable to how it is now, and I’m excited for that. I want it so badly.

Magazica: I’m not trying to push you to do a future prediction or something. But what are the sectors, according to you, will experience those changes? Any educated guess?

Dr. Julie Wilson: Okay. Note-taking, that’s already taking off. It takes up more than half of our time to do that. So cutting that out allows us to not only do better patient care, but save time, but also write better notes, because AI has time to write 3 pages based on what I talked about, whereas I would just write one paragraph on what I talked about right?

And then my AI also does things like write, compile that note, make a summary. So I can email the patient. So then the patient doesn’t have to take notes can focus, but also has a complete description of what happened and what the recommendations are so.

Magazica: Hopefully, it will be there. But by listening to you, I think whatever makes the difference is that even if two patients are coming with exactly the same disease to you or to your clinic, but their lifestyle is different.

Dr. Julie Wilson: That’s definitely true. You have to talk to the patient, and that’s why it’s great to be a family doctor where you know. Then you say, hey, I know that you love to run marathons. So I know that the exercise component is already taken care of. So, let’s talk about other things where some people are averse to medications. Some people love medications, right? And you can talk to the patient based on their personality, their goals, their lifestyle. Just so you ask someone to do something, but actually they’re caregiver to 3 elderly relatives. It’s not possible for them to do a lot of things, and you have to work with them around those factors.

And I feel like half the time I’m doing medicine. And half the time I’m just doing brainstorming around their lifestyle to make it happen. And we sit and we talk about it. And I don’t think AI can necessarily do that yet in the future.

Magazica: Let’s see. But there will be a human touch always necessary.

Dr. Julie Wilson: And we all know if you’re in an in-person meeting, you pay more attention than if you’re watching in a Zoom Meeting, and then you’re paying more attention than if you’re watching a video. And if someone just gives you paperwork, you’re probably not paying attention at all. So, there’s something about humans being socialized, that if someone is sitting directly with you and looking you in the eye and saying, I think you need to exercise 150 min a week. It has much greater impact. You can see this in studies about smoking cessation. Everyone knows they should quit smoking. But even a 5 min talk by your family doctor significantly increases your chance of quitting smoking in the next few weeks. Because there’s something about that human interaction, somebody talking to you and telling you already know it.

Magazica: I think we are more wired in a face-to-face conversation than in any other type of communication system.

Dr. Julie Wilson: I think so.

Magazica: From the inclusion perspective, for those who are not well off, there is a challenge. Because you have sat almost all sides of the conference table, as an entrepreneur, a medical practitioner, a family doctor, how do you see that future that we are including the greatest number of people in the most accessible way. How do you see that?

Dr. Julie Wilson: I see wonderful changes in that, wonderful. So, in DC, we’ve created the primary care networks which is based on a geographic location, we get funding and then allocate resources. So, for example, in my own clinic, we have free for patients, social workers, occupational therapists, chronic disease nurses, counseling. There’s also access to the frail seniors, team and physiotherapy, etc., and more. And a lot of times you would have a patient of limited finances, and they would say, “Oh, I need to get this taxi credit, and I need this form, and I don’t know what to do. And my housing is gone,” and you’re trying to figure as a doctor. We don’t really know, and you’re just Googling. Now I can send them to the social worker who knows who can help them with that.

Or people find medications very expensive. So, it’s talking to the chronic disease nurse and the dietitian about how to manage their health conditions through lifestyle can help a lot, but also people of low income may not be able to afford their own version of that, pay for your own dietitian, for example. And also, they can talk to you like, “Okay, I know you don’t have a lot of finances, so let me find you a diet that you can afford,” that’s still healthy. Otherwise, you’re getting things like, “Eat liver and spinach for your low iron,” and, you know, “Eat mainly vegetables,” but vegetables are so expensive. How do you do that? Right? So, a lot of those things are beneficial, and more and more of those resources are coming out with time, which is really fantastic.

And other things that are beneficial is that you know. And I see this in my med. I love to train medical students, but you know you see them. They get a lot of this training that we didn’t have about diversity and inclusion. So, they come in much more sensitively. And then with the new payment models of having more time with the patient, you know. Getting to know the patient helps you be more sensitive to them. Know what’s going on in their life.

I find that that is a huge change, and also getting rid of the sort of the walk-in component. It was always very crucial for people to get in urgently, but having a person who knows you well, who is your family doctor and nurse practitioner. I think, is one of the most crucial things you can do to feel heard in medicine and feel respected. So that’s one thing I’m trying to do to add more and more of these providers to the system. It’s one of my big passions, hiring so many people so that people can have that personal connection. And they’re not just trying to explain themselves every time, because a lot of times people who have poor education or have poor language skills in English, or French, would find that they can’t communicate their health needs very well, and then their health outcomes suffer for that. But if somebody knows you well, then I think that you can get past a lot of that.

Magazica: No doubt about it. It’s fascinating. Very quickly, one last thing: you’re so passionate about providing services in a very caring way. So what steps are you taking to promote women in healthcare? And what changes would you like to see in the industry?

Dr. Julie Wilson: Oh, I could talk to you about this forever.

Magazica: We will have another session on this.

Dr. Julie Wilson: There is this book everyone should read, called – Invisible Woman: Data bias in a World Designed for Men. That’s an amazing book. But essentially, if you look at recent studies, and even winning the Nobel Prize in Economics recently have shown that, there is gender pay gap even if you have the same training. Most women throughout their lives cannot work a 9 to 5 job because they have stuff to do. They’re the caregivers for children. And then, because of that, they’ll choose a job with greater flexibility. And then those jobs, greater flexibility often pay less, even though it’s the same training.

So, one thing I tell everyone in my clinic. They ask me, what hours can I work? I’m like whatever hours you want. Well, what are my requirements? Whatever you want, I say, as long as you keep your college guidelines you are keeping to the ethics of your profession, and not doing anything wrong regarding that. You’re a fully grown adult. Do whatever you want, and I will make it work for you.

And most of them are extremely surprised by this, which is sad. It is sad because there’s no reason the clinic should be open from 9 to 5. Why can’t somebody work from 8 Pm. Till midnight, or from 6 Am. Till 10 Am. Or just come in for an hour or leave to pick up their kids from school. The fact that there are restrictions, even at this highest level of education, when there shouldn’t be means that woman cannot succeed.

So, I try and take everything that I’ve ever heard about that prevents women from succeeding, which is mainly a flexibility thing, and I just make it a non thing. I just make it disappear for them, and they’re very happy.

Men like it, too but they just haven’t been necessarily brave enough to ask for or adjusting their lifestyles, right? But men also have greater caregiving roles. They want to be better parents, etc. So, it’s good for everyone. I don’t just only do it for women. But definitely, it’s a bigger concern for my female colleagues and for my front desk staff and all my staff. I give them 100% top of maternity and paternity leave. And because I believe that’s a huge factor. You know, and I pay that out of my own pocket because I truly believe in it.

And then other things would be, you know, working from home. I try and make it as easy as possible for them. Because if you have kids or need to do things, you need to be able to work from home. And I again invest in those resources to make it equally efficient. I also do a lot of quality improvement projects. So, if somebody brings up a concern or something that they need, I just work on it right away. Because everyone’s story is a little different.

And I think societal pressures have put it that way, and I think we just need to break a lot of the 1950s work restrictions that were based around men’s.

Magazica: Thank you so very much for being such a wonderful guest. I really hope and pray to Mother Nature that this is not the last conversation we are having.

Dr. Julie Wilson: I had so much fun. Thank you.

Magazica: Thank you so very much again.