After guiding St Josephs healthcare through an unprecedented pandemic, Executive Vice President, Chief Clinical Officer & Chief Nursing Executive Winnie Doyle is retiring.
For close to five decades, Winnie Doyle’s work life has been guided by a key principle that ensured a varied career full of change and opportunity, “I wanted to love my work.”And love it, she has. Although, the young Australian woman who enrolled in a diploma nursing program in the early 70s had no premonition of the well-respected, influential, health care executive she would become.
With a diploma and a year of work behind her, Winnie made her way to Britain. She expanded her skillset with sub-specialty training in mental health, and becoming a midwife.
Newly married, Winnie joined St. Joe’s in 1983 as a staff nurse in mental health, and continued her schooling to earn a degree. She took a turn working with outpatients in community psychiatry, the women’s health concerns clinic, and also spent time as a research assistant.
“In nursing, there are many ordinary moments, but in those ordinary moments there are things that are extraordinary,” she said,
Initially turning down opportunities to become a manager, Winnie took a role after getting a nudge from
From there, a steady upwards trajectory began over the next 20 years. Director of Nursing, Mental Health in 2000. Chief Nursing Executive in 2001, Executive Vice President, Mental Health 2002, Executive Vice President, Acute Clinical Programs, 2005. Executive Vice President, Clinical Programs, 2016.
“It wasn’t a barrier being a woman, although when I first became a V.P., at that stage only 3 per cent of CEOs in Ontario were women.”
Reflecting on her beginnings in nursing Winnie says,“I could go back to front line nursing and be very happy doing it.”
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