Dr. Andrew Healey is a specialist in Emergency and Critical Care Medicine. He is Chief of Critical Care and Chief of Emergency Medicine at St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton and a Clinical Professor in the Department of Medicine at McMaster University. Originally from Newfoundland, he completed medical school at Memorial University of Newfoundland, then residency in Emergency Medicine and fellowship in Critical Care at McMaster. He also completed a Master in the Donation of Organs, Tissues, and Cells for Transplantation at the Universitat de Barcelona, Spain. He is the Provincial Medical Director for Organ and Tissue Donation with Ontario Health’s Trillium Gift of Life Network.
Dr. Healey places trust, transparency, and adaptive leadership at the center of his work. At St. Joe’s, his clinical leadership now focuses on stabilizing Emergency and Critical Care programs, bringing direct, honest feedback into daily practice, and aligning services that don’t always pull in the same direction and then steadily tackling the harder trade-offs that require shared losses. During COVID-19 he led one of Canada’s busiest, hardest-hit emergency departments (William Osler Health System) while helping coordinate the hospital response. He believes leadership isn’t a side job; it’s deliberate work done in the open, accountable to patients, families, and staff.
Provincially, his portfolio includes large-scale changes in organ and tissue donation, death determination, and donation policy. Milestones include Ontario’s first routine offer of donation after MAID and the first home-based MAID lung donation (enabled by non-perfused organ donation, built without dedicated funding when better-resourced programs elsewhere stalled), the province’s first framework for safe withdrawal of life-sustaining measures in donation hospitals with the quality systems that build trust, and co-leading Ontario’s implementation of heart donation after death by circulatory criteria and normothermic regional perfusion. He has also helped establish a Family Listening Post so donor families can shape practice with real-time feedback. Away from work, he’s grounded by four children and an overly understanding wife.
