Turning frontline experience into policy change for better primary care access
Age: 39
Job Title: President of Nurse Practitioner Association of Alberta
While Jennifer Mador was studying pre-med to become a doctor, her aunt — a nurse researcher at McMaster University — encouraged her to pursue nursing instead. Mador became a registered nurse (RN), but after two years at the bedside she felt limited in scope. “The scope of practice at the RN level did not allow for the level of responsibility I was looking for,” she says.
Once again, she turned to her aunt, a leader in cardiovascular health in Canada, for inspiration. “She broadened my perspective,” says Mador. “Nursing is not just about bedside care and providing the orders of a physician. There are lots of opportunities within nursing to be a manager or researcher influencing national policy.”
Mador returned to school for a nurse practitioner degree, a master’s-level designation that broadened her scope of practice. An “NP” can do most of what family physicians do — diagnosing, prescribing, ordering and interpreting tests. After treating emergency room patients, Mador was sometimes asked “How can I follow up with you?” There simply wasn’t funding for her to provide that kind of ongoing clinical care, so she had to discharge patients knowing they had nowhere else to turn.
In 2021, she joined the Nurse Practitioner Association of Alberta as a director and began pushing for public funding models that would allow nurse practitioners to run their own primary care practices. When the presidency opened in 2024, she stepped into the role. Since then, she has successfully advocated for $15 million in provincial funding (the first time NPs were included in the provincial budget) to support 80 practitioners in launching their own clinics. To help these nurses transition into business ownership, Mador also secured a $2-million grant for the nurse practitioner’s association to cover infrastructure needs such as legal, accounting and consulting services.
Since implementation, Saskatchewan and Newfoundland have introduced comparable models, and other provinces are now exploring similar approaches. “Now,” she says, “I can tell patients to look for an NP to be their primary care provider.”
This article appears in the November/December 2025 issue of Edify
