Alumni Profile: Tanya Houghton
Senior Director, Health Care and Specialized Claims Services, WorkSafeBC
MHA Alum, Class of 2023
Tanya Houghton says her role at WorkSafeBC is about finding value for workers in need of care and their employers who fund the compensation system.
The search for value, she says, comes down to finding shared values between WorkSafeBC, which educates employers and workers on safe work practices and enforces occupational health and safety regulations, and the broader health-care system.
Common ground can be hard to find as they “rely on one another and yet have a lot to learn about the systems each of them are governed by,” she says.
Houghton says the Master of Health Administration at UBC’s School of Population and Public Health helped her to more deeply understand multi-stakeholder perspectives.
As WorkSafeBC’s senior director of health care and specialized claims services, Houghton works to ensure that injured workers across the province receive high quality recovery and return to work services that meet their unique needs in a timely, effective and efficient manner.
She also has to work to see that employers get value for money as they fund WorkSafeBC. Communication, she said, can prove challenging when interests, ideas and institutions don’t fully understand one another.
“We direct and pay for the provision of health care for injured workers and at the operational level have a lot to learn about how health systems and health funding operate and I would suggest those within the health system has a lot to learn about the Worker’s Compensation system and our interdependencies with one another,”she says.
Houghton, who started her career as a social worker, has held leadership roles in Canada, the U.S., U.K., Australia and New Zealand.
She says her studies with MHA have taught her how to bridge gaps. “I feel better equipped to navigate conversations with our colleagues in the health authorities and possess a deeper understanding of their approach to addressing challenges at a strategic and operational level as well as the language they use and the unique nature of them as an institution now than I did before.”
“I can show up with a different level of compassion and curiosity to say, how do we get where we need to get and how do we partner strategically so that we can leverage the collective to achieve our common goals.”