Dr. Luc Boileau has been chosen by the government of Quebec to succeed Horacio Arruda as national director of public health for Quebec, as the province goes through a deadly wave of COVID-19 cases marked by the Omicron variant. But who is this doctor with a long record?
Trained in medicine at the University of Sherbrooke in the early 1980s, Luc Boileau also holds a specialization in public health and preventive medicine as well as a master’s degree in health administration at the University of Montreal, where he graduated from ‘elsewhere taught in recent years.
“He is a high-level manager in the organization of health services,” commented on Tuesday to Duty the professor at the School of Public Health of the University of Montreal, Roxane Borgès da Silva. The expert thus welcomed the decision of Quebec to appoint Mr. Boileau as successor, on an interim basis, to Mr. Arruda. ” [Luc Boileau] has all the skills to navigate this crisis linked to the hospital system, ”added the expert, who also qualifies Mr. Boileau as“ very good popularizer ”.
Since 2015, Mr. Boileau has been President and CEO of the National Institute of Excellence in Health and Social Services (INESS), which has made itself known to the general public since the start of the pandemic for its regular projections of the impacts of the pandemic on hospitalizations and occupancy of intensive care units in the province.
Before reaching this post, the doctor in his sixties managed numerous public health organizations. Luc Boileau notably worked for 15 years at the Agence de la santé et des services sociaux de la Montérégie, where he was first regional director of public health, planning and evaluation, before in 2001 became the president and CEO of the organization.
The doctor held this position until 2008. He then became CEO of the National Institute of Public Health of Quebec (INSPQ) until 2015. His mandate was then, among other things, to “proceed the analysis, with a view to sustainability, of the various possibilities for bringing together “between the INSPQ and the INESSS” at the administrative, corporate and scientific levels.
“It is certainly someone who has a great experience in public health”, also reacted Tuesday Dr. Gaston De Serres, epidemiologist at the INSPQ. Mr. Boileau will however have the challenge of “establishing his credibility” with the population and the political elite, believes the expert.
The College of Physicians of Quebec, of which Mr. Boileau is a member, also underlined Tuesday, on Twitter, the importance that the successor of Dr. Arruda benefits from “the greatest independence in his opinions to ensure the adhesion of the population ”.
However, Luc Boileau is the father of Marjaurie Côté-Boileau, the press secretary of the Minister of Health Christian Dubé. A situation that raised eyebrows several Internet users as well as the opposition parties in the National Assembly on Tuesday. “It is sure that it can bother some,” admitted Ms. Borgès Da Silva.
On the international scene, Mr. Boileau has carried out numerous projects and study missions, especially in Africa. He is also a member of the Health Standards Organization, known by the English acronym “HSO”, a non-profit organization created in 2007 which aims to provide quality care “to all”, to the global scale.