About Ryan
Ryan Meili is a family doctor and community organizer; for years, he has been working to build healthier communities in Saskatchewan. Currently employed as a rural relief locum, Ryan’s job as a family doctor takes him all over the province to give doctors in small communities some much-needed and well-deserved time off. When not on the road he lives in Saskatoon’s core community of Riversdale.
Ryan also works for the College of Medicine at the University of Saskatchewan. As the chair of the Social Accountability Committee, he’s responsible for helping ensure that Saskatchewan’s future doctors are equipped to meet the health needs of the diverse communities they will serve. Among Ryan’s focuses are aboriginal, international, rural, and inner-city health.
Ryan is perhaps best known for his role as a co-founder of SWITCH, the Student Wellness Initiative Toward Community Health. Ryan helped spearhead this student-run, interdisciplinary, inner-city clinic, whose mandate is to bring students from nursing, medicine, social work, physiotherapy, pharmacy, nutrition, and numerous other disciplines together to serve the residents of Saskatoon’s core communities. Ryan was also the clinic’s first coordinator, and continues to work there as a supervising doctor.
Ryan also runs the College of Medicine’s Making The Links program. This program gives medical students the opportunity to work in Northern Saskatchewan (Ile a-la-Crosse and Buffalo River Dene Nation), in the SWITCH clinic in Saskatoon, and in the rural communities of Mozambique in South-East Africa. One of the program’s goals is for students to gain firsthand knowledge of the social factors influencing health by living among and working with diverse peoples.
Education and Training
Ryan grew up on a farm near Courval, Saskatchewan – his brother Jim still farms the family land. He attended Vanier Collegiate in Moose Jaw before going on to the University of Saskatchewan where he studied Human Anatomy and Languages.
After finishing his first degree, Ryan travelled to South America to experience life in the developing world. In 1999 he co-organized a project called Limbs and Light for Latin America, raising money to purchase a school bus which he then filled with prosthetic limbs for landmine victims and drove to Nicaragua.
Ryan entered the College of Medicine in September 2000. While in medical school, he became involved in health care advocacy. At the time of the Romanow Commission, he helped found a student group called Health Professionals for Medicare dedicated to educating the public about the benefits of a single-payer, publicly funded health care system. He remains passionate about this issue and is presently the Saskatchewan board member for Canadian Doctors for Medicare.
Ryan graduated from medical school in 2004, earning the Dr. G. Ernest McBrien Award for the highest standing in his Family Medicine clerkship. He completed his residency at the Westwinds Primary Health Centre in Saskatoon in June of 2007. He is also the recipient of a number of other honours: in 2006, he received a Saskatchewan Health Care Excellence Award; and in 2007, he was named Saskatoon’s Global Citizen of the Year by the Saskatchewan Council for International Cooperation.
Party Involvement
Ryan first joined the NDP during the leadership campaign of 2001. Since then he has volunteered on numerous provincial and federal campaigns and has attended the last two conventions as a delegate. At the 2006 convention, having been asked to speak about SWITCH, Ryan challenged the party to take a more active role in addressing the health needs of marginalized populations. Poverty, he argued, is a major contributor to ill health and needs to be treated as an epidemic, a threat to the stability of the body politic.
Through his involvement with social movements and party politics, this idea has always been at the forefront of Ryan’s mind. In working with diverse populations, he has come to understand the harm that marginalization and division cause and the need for surer societal bonds. We are only as strong as the most marginalized among us.
Ryan has entered the race for the NDP leadership because he believes that more can and should be done to build a healthier society – and that the New Democratic Party has the legacy and the grassroots energy to do it. As leader of the New Democratic Party of Saskatchewan, he will join with others to undertake the hard work of building a party capable of inspiring Saskatchewan’s diverse communities to build our future together.
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