The Office of the Vice-President, Health welcomes Dr. Ray Markham as the Special Advisor to the Vice-President, Health on Health Systems.
Dr. Markham is Executive Director of the Rural Coordination Centre of BC and a clinical professor in the UBC Department of Family Practice in the Faculty of Medicine. Prior to that, he served as Medical Director for UBC’s Rural Continuing Professional Development for six years. Dr. Markham has worked in rural family practice for over 20 years and currently lives in Valemount, where he practices full-service rural generalist family medicine in the Robson Valley. His diverse and productive medical career has taken him across the globe, including South Africa, the United Kingdom, Antarctica, Kenya, Haiti, and Zimbabwe. He is passionate about rural medicine in BC, where he helped establish the Northern Interior Rural Division of Family Practice as one of its founding directors and led its primary care network implementation.
In the newly created role of Special Advisor to the Vice-President, Health on Health Systems, Dr. Markham will provide vision and leadership to advance UBC Health’s strategic focus on innovation in the provincial health system. He will chair the UBC Health Systems Advisory Committee, which advises the Office of the Vice-President Health | UBC Health on priority issues in the health sector to enable dialogue, activate assets, and advance policies and innovations to improve health systems at the individual and community levels. Dr. Markham will be key to building and maintaining relationships between health system leaders, including academia, government, health authorities, health administrators, providers, and communities.
“With his experience and expertise in health systems planning, community contexts, and underserved populations, Ray will play a pivotal role in enabling effective advocacy for continuous quality improvement and knowledge translation in the health ecosystem,” says Dr. Dermot Kelleher, Vice-President, Health. “Ray will inspire UBC Health to contribute to health systems innovations that meet the needs of people in BC through all our strategic activities.”
Dr. Markham joins the UBC Health team on March 1, 2021 for a three-year term. Please join us in welcoming him to his new role.
Posted February 25, 2021
