the missing healthcare infrastructure
What If the Next Breakthrough in Healthcare Wasn't a Treatment—but Preparedness?
Back in May 2026, I attended a Hamilton Chamber of Commerce and Hamilton Health Sciences event about Vision 2030.
The room was full of extraordinary clinicians sharing research that is changing lives.
There was work on 3D-printed skin substitutes using stem cells to transform severe burn care. Research focused on earlier recognition of sepsis. Blood and genomic research helping us understand why some people develop certain diseases while others don't.
It was inspiring.
As I listened, I found myself asking a different question.
I asked it because of my dad.
In 2023, he died in a UK hospital after seven weeks in intensive care.
He had gone in for a double lung transplant—the treatment that was meant to give him more time.
The medicine was extraordinary. The surgical team, the ICU, the machines that kept him with us—all of it was world-class.
What my family wasn't prepared for was everything else.
Seven weeks of decisions we never imagined making.
My mum, my sisters and I trying to work out what he would have wanted, because we had never truly asked him.
The hardest decisions of our lives, made in the gap between loving someone completely and knowing what mattered to him most.
The care was excellent.
We were completely unprepared.
It made me realise that excellent healthcare and prepared people are not the same thing.
I have carried the difference ever since—first through my own cancer treatment, then into nearly 300 hours as a palliative care volunteer, and now into the work I do every day.
So, as I sat in that room full of breakthroughs, the question that came to me was this:
What if healthcare became known not only for world-class research and clinical care, but also for preparing people to navigate it?
Not preparing hospital buildings.
Preparing people.
Future patients.
Families.
Clinicians.
Communities.
Because despite all of our technological progress, many people still enter healthcare carrying uncertainty that no scan can detect.
They face decisions they never imagined making.
Families struggle to know how to speak for someone they love when they no longer can.
Clinicians navigate incredibly complex situations while trying to understand what matters most to the person in front of them.
These aren't failures of medicine.
They are often failures of preparation.
Healthcare has become exceptional at responding to illness and injury.
The next frontier is preparing people for it.
Preparedness is healthcare infrastructure
When we hear the word infrastructure, we often think of buildings, equipment, laboratories and technology.
Those things matter.
But there is another kind of infrastructure that is almost invisible until it's missing.
The conversations families have around kitchen tables—the one my family never quite had.
The confidence someone has to ask questions during a specialist appointment.
The knowledge that allows a substitute decision-maker to say, "I know what they would have wanted."
The communication skills that help clinicians navigate uncertainty with compassion.
None of these appear on a blueprint.
We can draw the kitchen table.
We can't draw the conversations that happen around it.
Yet those conversations shape almost every healthcare experience.
Preparedness is healthcare infrastructure.
A different definition of innovation
When we talk about healthcare innovation, we often celebrate breakthroughs in science and technology.
We should.
Those breakthroughs save lives.
But perhaps the next innovation is equally human.
Preparing people to navigate illness with greater clarity.
Helping families make decisions with confidence instead of uncertainty.
Supporting clinicians to deliver care that reflects what matters most to each person.
Creating systems where difficult conversations happen before they become urgent decisions.
Because the experience of healthcare is shaped not only by what medicine can do.
It is shaped by how prepared we are to navigate what medicine asks of us.
Technology should create more humanity, not less
Artificial intelligence will undoubtedly reshape healthcare.
The question isn't whether we'll use it.
It's how.
I don't believe the greatest opportunity is that AI simply answers our questions.
I think it's that AI helps us ask better ones.
Imagine a tool that helps someone reflect on what matters most before they ever meet a clinician.
Or helps a family organise their thoughts before sitting down for a difficult conversation.
Or gives someone the confidence to ask questions they didn't know they were allowed to ask.
Used intentionally, AI doesn't replace human connection.
It creates more room for it.
Because preparedness isn't built by technology.
It's built by conversations.
Technology should simply help more of those conversations happen.
The next frontier
Healthcare innovation has always been about extending and improving life.
We should continue pursuing extraordinary advances in science, research and treatment.
But perhaps the next frontier is ensuring people are prepared to experience those advances.
Because surviving illness and injury is not the only outcome that matters.
How people and families experience them matters too.
The conversations they have.
The decisions they make.
The confidence they carry.
The support they receive afterwards.
My dad received extraordinary healthcare.
My family received almost no preparation.
One gave us seven more weeks together.
The absence of the other changed us forever.
That's the breakthrough I'm working on.