In October, the Pediatric Chairs of Canada (PCC) presented Dr Laura Sauvé with a 2020 PCC COVID Leadership Award. The PCC represent the Departments of Pediatrics within the seventeen Canadian medical schools. They recognized Dr Sauvé for her work in Infection Prevention and Control (IPAC) and the BC Centre for Disease Control Clinical Reference Group, which leads all of the clinical COVID-19 guideline development for BC.
When Dr Sauvé was asked to support Infection Prevention and Control (IPAC), the work was expected to take about one day a week. Little did she know her role at BC Children’s Hospital and BC Women’s Hospital + Health Centre would evolve to 60+ hours a week, working full-time on IPAC measures earlier this year as the COVID-19 pandemic broke out. Dr Sauvé is now spending half her time doing IPAC and half on clinical work. She’s thankful for those who stepped up to help when the IPAC work took over, including the other physicians in Pediatric Infectious Diseases and her colleagues at Oak Tree Clinic.
Dr Sauvé says, before the pandemic, pediatricians hadn’t been as involved with IPAC work so strengthening those lines of communication has been important during this health crisis. She also notes that "this is not work that I have done by myself. It is work that my team has done. I’m very flattered, though, that they valued the work enough to think it merited a national award.”
From Burkina Faso to Canada
Dr Sauvé is also Chair of the Canadian Pediatric Society (CPS) Infectious Diseases Committee. At a national level, she leads the development of pediatric infectious diseases guidelines, and contributes to the CPS’s advocacy work. She has always been interested in the health of children around the world. At the beginning of her career, Dr Sauvé spent a year working in Burkina Faso, West Africa after she completed her Master’s of Public Health. She worked on providing HIV treatment for children through the Baylor International Pediatric Aids Initiative.
“Working in that setting was really important to me,” says Dr Sauvé. “Here in Canada, we have a couple hundred children living with HIV and they basically have access to treatment from the day they are born. In sub-Saharan Africa, there are millions of children living with HIV and less than half have access to treatment. We know that those children will die if they don’t have treatment.”
She says she learned important lessons during the time she spent in Africa which have helped her in this pandemic.
“I think what I learned is an understanding of respectful and genuine stakeholder engagement,” says Dr Sauvé. “It’s all about the teamwork. I’ve seen how engagement that wasn’t respectful or genuine has gone wrong. I think there’s always missteps or times when you think ‘I could have done that better’ but I learned how important it is to want to do your best and do it right.”
-Story originally shared on PHSA's POD