Recognition for changemaking media advocacy and system reform
Dr. Dominik Nowak has been named the recipient of the Medical Post Media Engagement Changemaker Award. The award recognizes his role as a gifted communicator and a driving force behind system-wide transformations in Canadian healthcare.
While he was president of the Ontario Medical Association (OMA), Dr. Nowak spearheaded the “Stop the Crisis” campaign, one of the OMA’s most ambitious media initiatives to date, which utilized integrated storytelling and data-driven messaging to achieve unprecedented reach and influence. Under his guidance, the campaign generated numerous news stories and reached millions of Ontarians through various media platforms.
Dr. Nowak’s work resulted in policy changes, including the adoption of OMA recommendations by all major political parties during a provincial election. This led to significant outcomes such as a $1.8 billion investment in team-based primary care, the establishment of a Rural Co-ordination Centre for Northern Ontario, and a commitment to AI scribes and centralized referrals. His efforts also raised public awareness about critical issues like ER closures and physician shortages.
Medical Post Awards
The Medical Post Awards recognize Canadian doctors and are selected by panels of physician juries. Coverage of this year’s recipients is here: The 2025 Medical Post Awards winners.
Crucially, Dr. Nowak’s advocacy focused on amplifying the voices of rural, northern and equity-deserving communities. He effectively merged strategic insight with moral conviction, leading from both the frontlines and the front page.
Dr. Nowak has set a new national standard for how medical leaders can engage with the media, demonstrating that a physician’s voice, used wisely and boldly, can be a powerful tool for progress. His work continues to shape the future of Canadian healthcare and serves as an inspiration for the next generation of physician-leaders.
Judge quote: “Dr. Dominik Nowak’s advocacy journey has been steady and consistent for several years. He was the face of the Ontario Medical Association’s ‘Stop the Crisis’ and this likely influenced the investments made by the Ontario government in funding for health care.”
- Q&A
Q: Given burnout and the healthcare system struggling, what do you see about the value of recognition in the physician community?
I think of some of the stories of recognition that I saw as president at the OMA. I was at an event with around 100 docs just outside of Toronto. It was a recognition event for people at five, 10, 15, 20 and 25 years of service and at first, the folks going up on stage in their early career had short, sweet shares. And then at around 15, 20, 25 years, you could hear total silence in the room as some of those doctors were sharing. One doctor spoke about the joy that she had from getting better and better at doing surgery for her patients. Another doctor spoke of love and meeting their partner in medicine, and building up a sense of community from within the profession. Another doctor spoke about how the technical parts of care changed over the last few decades, but the human parts stayed the same.
It was a celebration of those docs, but also a celebration of why we went into the field in the first place. And that’s what made it so beautiful. I saw so many of these types of events all across the province, and every single one of them stuck with me.
Q: Tell us how the Medical Post Awards helps the community?
I read the Medical Post avidly every single time I get a copy, and I think about my own journey in medicine. My parents moved to Canada from Poland a few years before I was born, and actually the only physician that I knew growing up was my family’s family doctor.
I had no idea how tough medical training could be, what the culture of medicine looked like.
I think sometimes we forget that what we signed up for is hard. And we need to be thinking about that proactively so that we can address what helps us build joy in work. And a big part of joy in work is not only that feeling of autonomy and self-determination, but also community, shared ideas, the tactics of how we practice medicine and care for patients.
But then also a reminder of that purpose, the why of why we’re here. The Medical Post supports that sense of community, that shared sense of purpose and that sense of getting better and better in practice as we go through the years.
Q: What inspires you about the healthcare profession these days? What motivates you to keep doing what you do?
I love being a family doctor and in terms of leadership work and advocacy, our team will share that they put me in front of a lot of doctors during my term. I met nearly 10,000 doctors during my term as president, mostly in small group meetings, clinic rooms, small interactions; many of them one-on-one. The thing that inspires me about the folks that I got to meet was that sense of true care for their patients, for their colleagues, and then for the healthcare system.
One of my favourite moments as OMA president was when I was in Timmins, Ont. and one of the doctors, Dr. Mario Ciccone, came up to me before the event and said, “Hey, look, I commissioned this book to give to you.”
Obviously, it wasn’t to give to Dominik, it was to give to the OMA president, and to give to visitors that were visiting the community and looking to understand the healthcare system there. This was a doctor who had practised there for over 25 years, and they were so proud of the difference that they and their colleagues made in this community that they commissioned a historian to come visit and spend a few months in this community to document the health system, how doctors contributed to public health and to the social supports and fabric of this community.
It was such a special moment for me to see that look in this doctor’s eyes as they shared this book with me, and it was a sign of true care for the work that they did, pride in the work that they did, care for their colleagues, and a belief that our healthcare system can continue to get better and better for patients. It was truly special.
Q: What’s a challenge you’re facing leading change in healthcare and how are you overcoming it?
The times that we’re in in healthcare are heavy. It’s no secret that I came out strong on optimism during my term as president. That was my rally cry as we tackle change in healthcare. And you can imagine, yeah, there’s this young doc thinking about optimism, but I intentionally built in optimism as both realism and hope.
I remember a time when I myself felt burnout. I felt like I didn’t know whether I’d want to continue on in comprehensive family medicine—especially at a time, not that long ago, family medicine was feeling undervalued by the healthcare system.
It took me some time to recapture that sense of joy in my clinical work, and what actually did help me a lot in recapturing that was advocacy and leadership and getting involved. So if I were going to reframe my equation for optimism from the start of my presidency—I started with optimism equals realism and hope—now, I would say optimism is realism and hope, and action.
The action part was so important to me. It’s contributing to something bigger than myself, that gives me that sense of joy, purpose, community and light, even when things feel heavy.
It brought me a joy to be involved at a challenging time in healthcare, to make things better, even when things were heavy. I’ll say this: as physicians, if our patients were healthy, would the job be as special? When our patients need us, when we can make a difference, when we support someone through a challenging time or a difficult diagnosis, it’s heavy, but it also makes the work meaningful. It’s the same thing in leadership.
Q: Anything else I should know about?
I was at an event in the Ottawa area and a psychiatrist stood up and said: “We need to be looking out for supporting one another toward a better healthcare system. As a psychiatrist, when people can’t find a family doctor. I’m left to prescribe complex diabetes regimens. And that takes me away from doing the care that I’m trained to do. So, let’s get every single person in Ontario a family doctor, let’s support that as a profession.”
That sense of solidarity across the profession is so important, uniting around primary care as one of many examples. I saw that play out over and over when I visited communities across Ontario: that doctors were standing up in support of one another, including across specialties, to get our system to a better place.