Dr. Eileen de Villa leads an organization with nearly 2,000 employees, a budget close to $250 million, and the task of looking after the health of 2.8 million people.
Sound daunting? Clearly not to de Villa, BSc’91, who relishes her new role as Toronto’s medical officer of health.
“I think it’s the perfect role because it combines everything that I’m interested in and allows me the opportunity to apply my skills and knowledge – I feel – to good use.”
It’s an “incredible platform” to advance public health goals and set the pace for Toronto – and Ontario, and even nationally, she argues – about what improves the health status of populations.
De Villa, formerly the Peel Region’s medical officer of health, began the job last March.
She earned the first of her four degrees at McGill, a Bachelor of Science, with majors in psychology and women’s studies.
“Some of my fondest memories to date are from my time at McGill,” says de Villa who sits on the McGill Women, Leadership & Philanthropy Board in Toronto, which aims to increase the representation of women in positions of leadership, governance and philanthropy.
“I met really, really wonderful people with whom I still keep in touch. It was just such a great and vibrant city.” It was also a formative period for de Villa, whose parents, both physicians, came to Canada from the Philippines.
“I came from a privileged background. While my parents had always taught me that it was important to give back to community, I think that became more solidified, and it became more my opinion than it was me reflecting my parents’ opinion, at McGill.”
De Villa says it took her a bit of time to decide to become a doctor, recalling how she had many interests when she graduated from McGill.
“Actually trying to narrow down, to say that ‘this is what I’m going to do for the rest of my life’, I found very challenging.”
She went on to do an internship in the United Nations system, followed by a Master of Health Science (Health Promotion), and realized she might be able to do more within international or public health if she became a physician.
At the University of Toronto’s medical school, De Villa did her residency in public health and preventive medicine. (She also earned an MBA at York University.)
She had thought of pursuing a career in law. She was interested in politics and international affairs.
“But I was also very driven by doing something to improve the lot of those in our community that are less fortunate than I was. So for me, public health and preventive medicine afforded the opportunities to basically cover all those interests on a regular basis, and to feel that I was actually contributing and giving back to my community in the best way – using the skills, talents, and opportunities that I had been afforded as best as possible.”
Toronto, like other jurisdictions, grapples with an opioid problem. Last summer, in the context of an overdose epidemic, de Villa called for a public discussion on the merits of decriminalizing drugs.
“I think the enforcement approach that we have currently is meant to discourage the use of drugs. And that doesn’t seem to be effective,” says de Villa, mentioning the opioid crisis facing communities across the country, with the situation worse in the United States.
She doesn’t believe there’s a perfect solution, but says: “I think we have to at least have the conversation and recognize that our current approach is clearly not having the desired impact. What then can we do that might actually move us closer to where we would like to be?”
De Villa points out that chronic disease is a major cause of preventable morbidity and mortality for Canadians. Many things can be done at a population level to prevent chronic diseases (such as diabetes or heart disease) from happening or at least delay their onset.
The better public health is at doing its prevention work at the population level to improve health and reduce disparities, she adds, “the more sustainable we’re making the health care system.”
The challenging files create the potential for an increasing conversation that de Villa says she’d like to see between her department and the community so that people understand public health.
“We’re a little less overt, I think, in many ways than your clinical care system. People understand their family physician or their specialist, and they recognize and understand what hospitals do.”
However, when your job is prevention, she adds, “often times you’re in the background, and it’s difficult for people to appreciate the work that went into preventing something from happening.”