Dr. Lawrence Loh

Leaders of today must be attuned and empathic to their team’s challenges. Through being open and vulnerable, modelling collaboration, and celebrating diversity and fairness, teams succeed. Open and high-performing teams rely on freely given trust and confidence, autonomy, a focus on understanding rather than commanding, and, when things go wrong, an approach oriented towards fixing issues rather than affixing blame. From his wide-ranging leadership experiences, including his recognized work during the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Loh illustrates for audiences the importance of putting “well-meaning and wellbeing” at the core of leadership today.

Every opportunity to communicate represents a chance to tell a story, particularly in a crisis. But who is hearing the messages? How do those messages conflict? What ultimately gets heard? How far does one share, and how does each public release or exchange build out an overall story? Communications is fundamental to the practice of public health, and tightly linked to effective crisis management. Through this talk, Dr. Loh helps equip the audience with tools and approaches drawn from examples among his experiences, including but not limited to the pandemic, on effective communication amid crises of varying natures and magnitude in different settings.

Many of the current healthcare challenges—increasing rates of chronic diseases like diabetes, heart, and lung diseases, worsening mental health and wellbeing, injuries, and decreased physical activity—are a result of past urban planning decisions taken decades ago that gave rise to sprawling, automobile-dependent suburbs. Tackling our built environment is one of the surest ways to invest in a healthier future—but what must be done, and what is the resistance? In these presentations, Dr. Loh outlines the challenge before communities around the world in linking health status to present-day urban forms, before reviewing what can be done, drawing on work that he has led in this space previously as a local public health officer, as well as other global examples. He also reviews what barriers prevent more investment in healthy communities, and how the audience might help to overcome these.

Australian singer-songwriter Ben Lee famously wrote in his song, Begin, that “the city is living proof that we need to be together.” Even so, despite a world awash with instant messaging and point-to-point flights, people are lonelier and more disconnected than ever, with the U.S. Surgeon General and World Health Organization in 2023 declaring loneliness an epidemic. Dr. Loh’s presentation draws on both his public health expertise but personal orientation as an extrovert and connector to help audiences understand the health impacts of loneliness, policy and programmatic changes that might help address loneliness, and individual level actions that one can take to prevent loneliness and ensure that one is “socially healthy.”

Despite increasing inclusion and making up a growing proportion of the workforce, study after study notes that Asian-Canadians and Asian-Americans remain underrepresented in leadership within the healthcare sector, among others. The reasons for this are multifactorial and lie within both traditional stereotypes of North American Asians in respect of their perceived leadership ability and approaches, as well as systemic barriers that limit upward mobility for Asian leaders. Having served in several senior leadership roles, Dr. Loh shares his personal experiences to help audiences see how these intersecting issues manifest in reality while offering insights as to how Asian minority leaders might better find support in overcoming these barriers and stereotypes.