Talking about the QHS Action Plan with Dean Lisa Tannock

Feature Stories | 27 Oct 2026 | Read time: 4 min | Written by:

Dean Lisa Tannock introduced the Queen’s Health Sciences (QHS) Action Plan and 2025-2026 Annual Report at her recent town hall meeting with staff, faculty, and students. We sat down with her to talk about how the plan came together, what’s important for everyone to know, and her impressions of Queen’s after a year in the role.

What was the process and thinking behind creating the new Action Plan?

We knew that our previous strategic plan was nearing the end of its term and needed to be revisited. Upon examining it, we found that our strategy was still valid. The strategic goals remain relevant and important, and they're aligned with the Queen's Bicentennial Vision. However, it is time for us to revise and clarify the actions that will help us achieve those goals. That’s how we set upon building the Action Plan.

Like the prior plan, we also wanted to make sure that we had broad consultation across all QHS. I'm so appreciative and proud of the team that came together in this work. We heard from folks at the town halls and through a survey. We had 64 people across seven working groups that represented faculty, staff and students and from all ranks. The Action Plan outcomes were formed by, and reflect what, the teams came up with.

The plan talks about foundational work that’s needed across the faculty and is outlined in the plan. Tell us more about that.

The point is that truly foundational work is needed to help us move forward. We have a number of very manual processes that are labour-intensive and create bottlenecks and risk of errors. There's lack of clarity around our organizational structure and governance, and pathways to action. We need to address all of these foundational elements. We need to automate processes, give teams the tools, templates and systems, enable AI where safe and trusted and streamline some of this important work. This will help unlock capacity so our teams function at the level they need to rather than tied up with busy work and administrative burden.

We have already started this this work. For example, we know faculty recruitment timelines at Queen’s are long with many people involved across departments, central areas, QHS decanal team, QHS HR and others. We are engaging process mapping work and working with IT to streamline some of our processes and identify tools and systems to speed up and improve faculty recruitment timelines.

How will teams manage the additional work of action plan initiatives with the amount of day-to-day work that’s needed?

A huge part of our Action Plan is administrative efficiency. We have to update our fundamental underlying processes, automate where we can, use AI where it's appropriate and safe, and reduce the number of manual processes. We need to invest in these areas, and we'll probably have to create some interim positions to initiate that work and get it off people's desks. Once we have a better foundation, infrastructure and automation of processes, then I expect that it will alleviate some work, free up people's time and give them bandwidth to work on some of these new actions and priorities.

Tell me about the values and why are they important?

The values guide us in what we do. It's important to take a moment to pause and reflect on our values. It's easy for people to react in the moment and if we do that without having our values to guide us, we can inadvertently diverge and move in a tangential way. In defining our values, we are ensuring that for every decision we make, we are acting in a way that abides by our values, rather than reacting to the current pressures of the world.

One of the things that we did was to examine each action and key performance indicator (KPI) to ensure that our values were visibly represented. This is especially important for our work and values related to I-EDIAA (Indigenous – equity, diversity, inclusion, accessibility and anti-racism). In many strategic plans or action plans the I-EDIAA focus appears largely demographic-focused, and to me, in 2026, that is not sufficient. We need I-EDIAA values to be embedded into everything we do rather than just stand alone in only one area. So, with the help of Sarah Funnell (Associate Dean, Indigenous Health) and Colleen Davison (Associate Dean, Equity and Social Accountability), we went through to make sure that all our values and commitments to I-EDIAA are eminently visible in each of the actions. That is really important to me.

How are we going to be accountable to our overall goals?

We just launched our 2025-2026 Annual Report that gives a good snapshot of who we are and the work we are doing. In future reports, we will include information on our Action Plan progress so that annually there will be an update on what we had proposed to do in the year and what we achieved.

Another way we built in accountability is aligning with our budget process. Right now, we are in the throes of kicking off the budgetary preparation for next fiscal year and all of departments and shared service units have been asked to link their budgetary plans with the Action Plan so that we have that alignment.

It’s also important we keep the Action Plan as a day-to-day roadmap rather than sitting on a shelf somewhere so that when decisions and opportunities come up, we can say, “does this align with our Action Plan?” to keep us on track.

What challenges do you see ahead for QHS?

To start with - financial pressures. We generated a small surplus ($1.8 million) in 2025-26 but there are a number of new financial pressures that have presented themselves, even in the last six months. The challenge is that this is coming after the harsh cuts that were made as part of the austerity measures. So, we must be careful to avoid that general sense of, ‘when can we go back?’ The reality is that financial pressures remain constant and so we’re not going to be able to go back and do what we did before. This is the new normal.

Another challenge is the traditional and siloed nature at Queen’s. Queen’s is one of the oldest universities in Canada and has an incredible reputation and committed alumni group. But while the programs and people are excellent, I feel that we potentially undermine ourselves by sticking to our traditional ways of doing things. We want to make sure we keep the “magic” of the culture: the strong focus on community and student leadership, the integrity of our academic excellence, and the highly collaborative people. But we need to build administrative and operational efficiencies across departments, schools and even Faculties to ensure we are maximizing our potential and ensuring ongoing sustainability for future generations.

You've been in the role for just over a year. What has delighted you about QHS?

I am delighted by the people and the community, the ideas, the energy, the commitment, the vision, the collaboration. It's just a great place to work every single day. I love the opportunity to walk around campus and meet more people. I’ve very much enjoyed our Coffee with the Dean discussions, in particular. I’m excited to keep working to achieve better collective achievements, energy, and vision across QHS.

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4 min