On A Mission To Inspire Change

Amie Archibald-Varley is available to speak on a variety of topics: nursing and healthcare, mental health and wellness, health equity, transformative change in teams, advocacy & her signature DEFIANT model.

Amie is available for keynotes, panels, workshops, consultations, conferences, media, virtual/webinars, brand partnerships, film & television appearances.

We continue to witness and examine the past few years’ impacts on our lives. In many industries and communities, the pandemic has left our tanks empty. So, what now?

More than ever, leaders must commit to the ongoing work of creating environments that are supportive, inspiring, and attractive.

Based on her experience within healthcare & health equity advocacy, Amie shares how leaders in any industry can lead with compassion and empathy. When working with teams suffering from moral injury and stress, Amie shows how this leadership mindset can help transform and restore their mental health, satisfaction, and productivity.

We’ve met many challenges but we now have an opportunity to make our workplaces, schools, & communities stronger than ever.

Key takeaways:

How to assess the current state of your team and organization

How to combat stigma and shame around mental health in your workplace

How to connect with one another through compassion, empathy, and engagement

You are an advocate – you just don’t know it yet. It is a skill that we can harness to see better healthcare outcomes for all community members. Advocacy does not stop at the bedside. Advocacy is action, change in policy and quality improvement. Advocacy is about learning about healthy public policy, the social determinants of health (including racism as a new determinant of health) and understanding the community’s needs. Advocacy is not speaking on behalf of the community but, rather, standing WITH the community and using power, resources, and agency to make meaningful.

Advocacy is political. How do we inform the greater public to build support? We can do it! Amie Archibald-Varley will show you how.

Discussing mental health in healthcare can be a challenge, but it doesn’t have to be. How do we discuss mental health in healthcare and reduce the stigma healthcare workers face regarding these discussions? Is mental health treated with as much care and consideration as physical health? Is burnout the only option? Why does my employer not seem to support me?

We need to eliminate stigma by opening up the conversation on mental health. This is personal. Amie Archibald-Varley has been transparent about her experiences with depression, anxiety, and postpartum depression. She has shown grit by combatting stigma and shame with openness by creating a platform that allows her to encourage others to lift their voices, tell their stories and lobby the government for change.

How do we use quality improvement to leverage health equity and healthy public policy change? Amie Archibald-Varley engages participants to consider how they can shift into active anti-racist action throughout their personal lives, careers, and community.

Key Takeaways:

An understanding of how power, privilege, and policy intersect in healthcare to create inequities

Understanding what society constructs as “normal” and “other.”

How to critically reflect on how policy and social media, and narratives impact negative stereotypes related to race

Everyone has a story to tell. Storytelling in healthcare is a powerful tool. It can change peoples’ perceptions, open up dialogue, and generate new ideas and conversations. It is how we bring others into our worldview, present a different perspective and connect with one another. It is about compassion, empathy and engagement. A story can be compelling and captivating, bringing us in and focusing our attention. Stories impact our brains differently than simply presenting abstract facts and figures. On this workshop, Amie Archibald-Varley helps individuals harness the power of Contextual story-telling.

Story telling is a skill that can be developed and crafted just like any other skill. If harnessed correctly, we can make connections, build confidence and most importantly, bring about change in healthcare.

If you have been on Twitter…Oh I mean “X” it has been a crazy place. How about the idea of healthcare and social media? No one would have thought that the two could go together; however, for better and for worse, the two have begun to merge in recent years.

Social Media has helped spread hope and communicated fantastic innovations to a broad and diverse audience in ways never dreamt of. Conversely, the blending of healthcare and social media has left many people feeling uncertain, disaffected and confused. The pandemic has heightened healthcare providers’ awareness of social media’s power, and it has become evident that it can empower people to lobby for change. It has allowed people to share ideas and construct and share powerful narratives. However, social media can also demonize, mischaracterize, and spread health misinformation, ultimately causing a great deal of harm. Currently, we all must be savvy when using technology as an additional tool in our toolkits. Amie Archibald-Varley is an expert in navigating social media and has become a freelance journalist for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), a Radio Columnist with Bell Media’s Newstalk1010 and has been featured in and, billboards, documentaries and television shows (yes she was in a Haunted Hospitals Episode) syndication and news to documentary articles and op-eds internationally. She is also in the process of co-writing a book with a large publishing house. In this keynote or workshop, Amie explores how to you can effectively use social media as a tool for change, innovation, and empowerment.

The CDC defines Health Equity as, “the state in which everyone has a fair and just opportunity to attain their highest level of health.” In my roles as a Health Equity Specialist & Quality & Patient Safety Specialist, I have seen inequities play out in real time. How do health organizations examine equity in their communities, universities and colleges and hospital systems? Achieving Health Equity requires leaders in healthcare to INVEST in changes related to addressing historical and systemic injustices; examining the social determinants of health and eliminate/remove preventable health disparities. This takes dedicated time and resources—and cannot be done off the side of ones desk.

If your organization is looking for a qualified consultant in relation to Health Equity work—Amie Archibald-Varley is a sought out leader in this field. She has experience in research and report writing, working with large Hospital Systems/Organizations, Health Community Partners, Provincial and Federal Governments in relation to Anti-Black racism and Health Equity Work. Her most recent report created for Niagara Health will be available soon.