2026 Agenda

Healthcare administrative professionals occupy a unique position within healthcare systems, working closely with senior leaders while navigating complex operations, relationships, and competing priorities. This session invites participants to examine how their daily work contributes not only to organizational effectiveness, but also to culture, psychological safety, and leadership impact. Through guided reflection, interactive exercises, and real-world examples drawn from over eight years supporting senior executives at UHN, participants will explore how administrative professionals can expand their influence, move from task-based support to strategic partnership, and intentionally shape their own career progression. The session will also address how to identify transferable skills, ask for mentorship, and seek growth opportunities while remaining grounded in professionalism and trust.

Recognizing that sustainable performance extends beyond the workplace, this session reframes “work-life balance” as life balance and intentional prioritization. Drawing on personal experience balancing a full-time healthcare role with creative pursuits, including writing and publishing a book, participants will explore how boundaries, energy management, and personal interests support resilience rather than compete with professional success. The focus is not on doing more, but on building careers and lives that can be sustained over time.

Interactive Elements Included:

• Guided self-reflection by Identifying unseen influence and strengths in your current role
• Mentorship mapping exercise by Clarifying who you can learn from and how to ask for mentorship
• Career growth prompts by reframing administrative work into leadership-ready skills

Key Session Takeaways Include:

• Greater confidence in recognizing and articulating their impact and influence as administrative professionals
• Practical strategies for career progression, including how to ask for mentorship and growth opportunities
• Tools to contribute to psychological safety and strong workplace culture through everyday actions

In highly regulated community-based healthcare environments, credentials often define authority — but they do not define leadership. This session explores how administrative professionals become influential leaders through initiative, operational foresight, strategic problem-solving, and relationship-building.

Drawing from lived leadership experience in behavioural health and developmental services, this presentation demonstrates how stepping beyond a job description — not beyond scope — builds credibility, drives systems improvement, and strengthens clinical and operational outcomes.

This session reframes administration not as support work, but as infrastructure leadership.

Key Session Takeaways Include:

• What happens when no one hands you the title? Identify how initiative can function as a form of professional credential
• Take courage to expand the role! Identify operational leadership opportunities within administrative roles that extend beyond traditional task-based responsibilities
• “I’m JUST an Admin!” Participants will apply the JUST Framework to strengthen problem-solving effectiveness, influence, credibility, and professional relationships.

Healthcare systems depend on a vast amount of critical work that happens behind the scenes; work that is often invisible, undervalued, and misunderstood. Administrative and operational professionals play a central role in ensuring patient safety, quality, and system reliability, yet their impact is rarely fully recognized. Drawing on over 15 years of experience in healthcare administration, leading Medical Device Reprocessing (MDR) quality improvement across a complex healthcare system, Stephanie Mailman Crouse explores how administrative professionals can move from a support role to being strategic system enablers.

Participants will learn practical ways to make invisible work visible, use data to improve efficiency without adding burden, and build a culture of psychological safety that supports staff engagement and resilience. Stephanie also shares how her personal experience as a breast cancer survivor has shaped her understanding of patient care and deepened her commitment to operational excellence that directly impacts patient outcomes.

Key Session Takeaways Include:

• Understand how administrative and operational roles directly influence patient safety, quality, and overall system performance.
• Identify strategies to make invisible work visible and valued within healthcare organizations.
• Apply principles of psychological safety and Just Culture to enhance team engagement and operational effectiveness.
• Use data and process improvements to streamline workflows while supporting staff wellbeing and resilience.

Healthcare administration operates under constant pressure, high accountability, and limited margin for error. Over time, this environment doesn’t just create stress, it changes how people think, decide, and communicate, often leading to burnout that shows up as fatigue, reactivity, and reduced decision quality.

This interactive session focuses on how pressure and burnout affect judgment in real time, and how leaders can preserve clarity and steadiness even when demands are high. Participants engage in practical exercises that help them recognize pressure patterns, interrupt reactive cycles, and make better decisions without slowing down care or operations.

The session provides tools leaders can use immediately to protect decision quality, reduce cognitive overload, and support themselves and their teams in high-stakes environments.   

An integrated AI component extends the learning beyond the session, enabling participants to apply the framework in real-world, high-stakes moments.

Key Session Takeaways:

• How pressure and burnout quietly erode decision-making and leadership effectiveness
• Practical ways to recognize and interrupt reactive patterns in real time
• AI Tools to maintain clarity, steadiness, and judgment in high-demand roles

Excel remains one of the most powerful — and underused — tools in healthcare administration. From tracking schedules and budgets to managing reports, lists, and operational data, administrative professionals rely on Excel daily, yet many are self-taught and unaware of time-saving features that can dramatically improve accuracy and efficiency.

In this practical, admin-focused session, Natasha Yankov shares essential Excel skills tailored to the real-world needs of healthcare administrative professionals. Drawing on her experience in program coordination and operational support, Natasha will demonstrate how to organize data effectively, reduce manual work, and create clear, reliable spreadsheets that support decision-making and collaboration.

This session focuses on confidence-building, immediately applicable Excel skills — no advanced formulas required.

Key Session Takeaways Include:

• Organize and clean data for better accuracy and readability
• Use essential Excel functions to save time and reduce errors
• Track projects, schedules, and administrative workflows more efficiently
• Create simple summaries and reports for managers and teams

Change is a constant in healthcare — new systems, shifting priorities, evolving regulations, and ongoing organizational restructuring. For administrative professionals, this often means managing uncertainty while maintaining performance, professionalism, and continuity of care.

Learn how healthcare administrative professionals can strengthen self-leadership skills to remain grounded, adaptable, and effective during times of change. Using proven self-leadership and Energy Leadership principles, participants will learn how to manage internal responses to change, communicate with confidence, and maintain focus and momentum — even when circumstances feel uncertain.

Key Session Takeaways Include:

• Understand common reactions to change and how they impact performance and decision-making
• Shift from reactive thinking to intentional self-leadership during uncertainty
• Maintain focus, confidence, and professionalism amid ongoing change
• Strengthen adaptability and personal accountability in evolving healthcare environments

Health care administrative professionals play a vital role in the health care system and are often exposed to many of the same workplace pressures and stressors as clinical staff.

Whether looking to reduce stress, enhance focus, or improve overall well-being, this webinar provides valuable evidence based tools to help health care workers thrive in the workplace. In this practical and engaging session, Kim Turley-Smith, Manager of Training and Curriculum at Your Health Space (CMHA Ontario), explores the components of mindfulness and introduces practical opportunities to examine how mindfulness can be personalized for use at work and elsewhere.

Participants will:

• Define mindfulness
• Explore components of mindfulness
• Practice simple mindfulness techniques that can be used at work

Healthcare administrative professionals manage projects every day — coordinating schedules, rolling out new processes, supporting initiatives, and keeping multiple stakeholders aligned — often without formal project management training or authority.

This practical session introduces project management fundamentals tailored specifically to administrative roles in healthcare. Participants will learn how to define scope, prioritize tasks, manage timelines, and communicate effectively — using simple, accessible tools and frameworks that can be applied immediately.

Key Session Takeaways Include:

• Understand what project management looks like in an administrative context
• Break down projects into manageable tasks and realistic timelines
• Learn how to use AI tools and practical prompts to support planning, prioritization, and communication in daily administrative work

• Understand why feedback in healthcare feels is important and yet can impact our emotions 
• Respond to patient and colleague feedback with professionalism, empathy, and clarity
• Set healthy boundaries to prevent emotional overload 
• Use feedback as a tool to improve patient experience, rather than a source of stress

In 2026, digital transformation in healthcare is an inevitable necessity. Organizations are no longer just going paperless but are integrating AI-driven diagnostics, predictive analytics, hybrid care models, and ERP systems. Administrators are the architects of this evolution acting as subject matter experts who shape designs and act as change leaders who offer guidance, information and direction.

Drawing from global experience leading transformational change across healthcare and public sector services, this session will explore how to weave change management into a project’s DNA from day 1. We will dive into practical ways to: build an adaptable culture where staff can thrive through change, hear and nurture the needs of supporters and detractors, and use AI and other digital tools to make the learning and practice process simpler and faster.

Key Session Takeaways Include:

• Learn how to build a culture of adaptability that will thrive in the face of change, using strengths to spark momentum and intentional reflection and action to remove interpersonal risks
• Recognize the critical role that change leadership plays at all levels, and how to foster and motivate a community to navigate change collectively
• Learn about AI tools, bite-sized digital assets, and embedded help tools that work best in the fast-paced, high-stakes healthcare environment