Why I Built SmartMatch
I've worked in this system from every angle — as a full-time employee, a casual shift worker, a travel nurse, and now as someone with a policy lens on what it costs us all.
I grew up in Prince Edward Island and trained at Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. My first travel contract was in 2011, and over the years I worked my way across the country — unit to unit, province to province, health authority to health authority. I saw what works, what doesn't, and what is quietly draining the life out of both nurses and the publicly funded system they serve.
Anyone who knows me knows I can't stop looking for gaps. I compare systems. I ask why things are done the way they are. I look for inefficiencies the way other people look for traffic shortcuts. It's just how I'm wired.
The agency model was the gap I kept coming back to. Facilities paying rates that bore no relationship to what nurses were actually earning. Agencies inserting themselves into relationships that didn't need a middleman. Health authorities losing millions in markup. And nurses spending hours on administrative work — re-uploading credentials, chasing timesheets, waiting for payroll — instead of patient care.
My master's capstone at the University of Calgary looked specifically at nursing burnout in Alberta — the policy failures and the structural fixes. What I kept finding was that the workforce problem was also a financial architecture problem. The way we fund and deploy nurses is broken at a systems level. And the agency model doesn't just cost money — it actively prevents the kind of transparent, direct relationships that would make the system more sustainable.
A Canadian healthcare workforce where professionals own their careers — controlling their schedules, building portable reputations — and where health authorities can finally deploy their budgets on care, not commissions. Direct. Transparent. Sustainable.
SmartMatch also actively encourages workers to transition into permanent roles with health authorities. We include zero non-compete clauses — ever. We understand that building a strong permanent workforce is essential to the system's health. We're part of the solution, not the problem.