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This past fall, an esteemed cardiologist and leading voice on heart failure — one of the world’s most burdensome chronic diseases — joined our MD Physician Council.

Dr. Shelley Zieroth is professor of medicine at the University of Manitoba and director of the Heart Failure and Heart Transplant clinics at Saint Boniface Hospital. Past president of the Canadian Heart Failure Society, she co-chairs the Canadian Cardiovascular Society’s guidelines for heart failure, which impacts more than one million Canadians.

“I fell in love with the management of heart failure,” says Dr. Zieroth, who first got her start as a postgrad at Toronto General Hospital. “It’s amazing to care for these patients for whom there is so much to consider, from clinical care to technology to the intersection of pharmacologic advances. It’s amazing to be part of a community that leads the country in patient-centred care and truly shared decision-making.”

Medicine wasn’t initially on Dr. Zieroth’s radar while growing up in the small town of Dauphin, Manitoba. She was interested in math and science and had pursued studies in pharmacy. Yet, she ultimately found herself drawn to biology.

She entered medical school and while learning about internal medicine a “switch flipped” when she was exposed to cardiology. Dr. Zieroth was interested in how complex the disease can be, the range of approaches and procedures in treating it and the innovations beginning to take off.

By 2006, she was a practising cardiologist. And owing to the frequent long-term nature of heart failure, she still cares for patients today that she met at the beginning of her career. Dr. Zieroth says her relationships are deeply rewarding because she builds a close connection with her patients through each stage of the disease: diagnosis, to stability, to using advanced therapies as the disease inevitably progresses, to often providing support through palliative care.

Dr. Zieroth has also devoted much energy to supporting her cardiology colleagues in care and research both in Canada and internationally. Today, she is a leader in developing and sharing new insights that can impact heart failure care on a global scale. As an investigator or member of a long list of clinical trials, she has also helped push the science forward on behalf of those who live with heart failure today — and for those who will be diagnosed in the years to come.

Diversity, equity and inclusion is an important theme at MD Financial Management, and Dr. Zieroth is a passionate advocate, particularly as it relates to women in the profession. She speaks on the subject often at conferences.

“Equity in medicine is important because representation matters,” she says. “It’s important to boost diversity among marginalized groups inside medical schools. One challenge is the leaky pipeline, where there is less representation in leadership and higher academic positions. It’s there where huge advances can be made.”

Those advances begin, Dr. Zieroth says, with leaders — including her — recognizing their own unconscious biases and privileges. “We have the opportunity to influence change in many areas of medicine, clinical trials, patient participation, referrals to specialist care, and so forth. We must deconstruct past concepts in order to achieve diversity.”

When it comes to financial literacy among physicians, Dr. Zieroth says that the tide is changing since newer generations of doctors are more aware of this important subject. As a career evolves into different stages and environments, she believes it’s important to have a base literacy level that should begin in medical school.

“We have enough stress in our work life as it is, so eliminating finances as a stressor can build resiliency among our young doctors,” she says. “Graduating with debt can be a crushing way to start your career just as you may be starting a family or finding a home. There is a big opportunity for organizations like MD Financial Management to help.”

That may one day include her own daughter, a 12-year-old who loves to play hockey and wants to be a doctor — a nephrologist, to be precise.

Dr. Zieroth says she hopes her position on the MD Physician Council will be a further opportunity to influence change and broaden her ability to be “disruptively constructive.”