Humber River Health is fortunate to employ a diverse community of talented, innovative and compassionate women. What better day to celebrate this than International Women’s Day? Meet Dr. Tasleem Nimjee, the Director of Medical Innovation here at HRH.

If the whole is the sum of its parts: I am my children, my husband (and best friend), my family, my faith, my community and my career.

I have two boys age seven and four. My oldest is a riot and handful. He teaches me about the gravity of different planets in our solar system. My youngest is rarely ever in a bad mood and approaches challenges in a methodical way with a process map built in his mind. For each of them, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Raising children and bearing witness to the way they learn has taught me a tremendous amount about myself. It also makes me realize how my most well-articulated thought may be (mis)understood differently by each person in the room. This thought is humbling – it gives me space to value others more than I ever did before I was a mother.

I am also a doctor and the Director of Medical Innovation here at Humber River Health… I should speak about that. When I was very young, my father took me to a UofT medical school open house for the public. I remember putting on a pair of oversized latex gloves and feeling a pair of deflated lungs, the rubbery heart, and the smooth surface of the liver. I can still feel it if I close my eyes. The magic of the human body excited me, and I went on to med school to become a cardiac surgeon. I came out of residency an emerge doc. Go figure. I enjoy the intensity of a resuscitation and the even greater intensity of the conversation with the family that follows. I feel privileged to be let into these moments of their lives. A medical career is truly a gift: I can’t think of any another job that gives you the privilege of connecting with such a wide cross-section of society as ours does. You learn about the people that coexist in your community that you would otherwise likely not interact with. If you listen carefully, they can offer you little pearls of wisdom every so often.