My grandmother’s table is full, and forks clink against my family’s emptying plates. One of my parents looks over at my uncle, who sits next to my sister, wearing a polo shirt, or a button-down. They ask my uncle, “So, what’s the latest crisis?”
In this memory, my uncle, Larry Svenson, is the Provincial Health Analytics Officer and Executive Director for Analytics and Performance Reporting at the Alberta Ministry of Health. In this memory, he is still alive.
Larry died from cancer in 2022. It was a process with a lot of preparatory grief, hospital time, and feeling the sense of finality settle within us. He remained as caring and cheerful as possible while living through the many appointments that came with his treatment. I still have the hand sanitizer that later came from the funeral home.
When I visit my uncle’s grave in Edmonton alone, I never allow myself to remember more than vague directions about where he was laid to rest. My body remembers the way. When I get there, I joke about his death in a way he’d find funny, and I trace my fingers over the carved dates on his grave marker: October 26, 1964 – March 24, 2022. When I visit his grave with my family, my grandma grips my hand to keep me from floating away. My sister and my Papa link arms to traverse the uneven terrain. The wind in the cemetery steals our voices. We speak in half-sentences and share a meal afterward. His absence is always noticed.
The simplest way to say what my uncle did for a living is that he worked with data.[1] At dinner, he’d describe how his team was predicting which flu vaccine would be the most effective, or he’d lay out the provincial STI [2] stats and we’d joke about how folks could benefit from comprehensive sexual education. We were all so proud of him when he got his PhD, no matter how often he had to re-explain epidemiology.[3]
The University of Alberta lowered the flag for Larry the week he died; it felt like the city was in mourning. My English professor at the time knew him and said she appreciated how he never lost sight of the fact that data comes from people with full lives.
In Larry’s 2015 thesis, he compares papers he had written before to evaluate the strengths and limitations of previous methods of processing administrative health data. I noticed how he emphasized the importance of Alberta’s free healthcare in making this research possible.[4]
We take a family trip to the place he was born – Summerside, PEI. In multiple drives during our stay, my grandma points at a house we pass. “That’s the house Larry got his first haircut in,” she says. I’m never sure if I’ve identified the right house. Larry was born and lived on the island for eighteen months before his father’s military job moved them around during his childhood, ultimately settling in Edmonton. Lucy Maud Montgomery was also in her Summerside birth home for eighteen months before moving in with her grandmother and eventually writing Anne of Green Gables. Her birth home is a curated museum, with staged rooms based on hypotheses and fragments of letters. Eighteen months might be short, but it’s enough, it seems, to matter to PEI.
Larry became an “ideas man” who contributed to “how data is shared across different departments within health.”[5] Everyone with an Alberta Health Number contributes to administrative health data by accessing health care. This data is superimposed across the landscape, processed, and used to identify health system needs. Big data has to be structured, privacy needs to be protected, and data processing jobs that appear to be automated are peopled instead. Larry was integral to the process of translating medical billing into the expansive Alberta administrative health databases we have today.[6]
Don Shopflocher, who worked with Larry in the 1990s-2000s processing administrative health data for the Alberta government, tells me that they would ask each other questions about the data to help liven up the day. They kept a collection of graphs and partial reports based on these hypotheticals, and on many occasions they were able to pull from their collection to answer questions for their supervisors. Larry and Don “got a reputation for being able to anticipate needs, because [they] knew enough about Alberta and about the political situation” that they could “anticipate the kind of questions that were going to come down the pipe.”[7]
My Aunt Jill – his wife – dug out papers for me,[8] and I sort through them while she and my sister make pasta. I ask her why he did everything he did.
She shrugs, and says, “[Larry] wanted to help people, and he saw that government was where he could help the most people given his skills.” It’s a logical answer, becoming of my uncle, with his mint condition Star Trek memorabilia and Big Bang Theory figurines. As a systems thinker, he saw how to maximize positive impact within the existing structure by looking to the future.
Betsy Varughese, who worked with Larry in the 2010s, tells me that she still remembers the excitement in his voice when he came out of his office to ask if “we can predict the peak of flu season.” [9] The question seems mundane, but it has an enormous impact on which vaccine is released and when. Alberta is still a significant location for flu research today, in part because of Larry’s question.
Betsy also emphasizes that “[Larry] knows how to encourage people in ways that are helpful,” and Ellen Rafferty (another colleague) echoes the sentiment, saying that “[Larry] wanted to help people and so he did that both through the [data-driven] research but also through the connections with people. He thought, ‘I can make this better,’ if that makes sense.”[10]
Don and Larry also worked collaboratively to increase data sovereignty for Indigenous populations. Don said that “[Larry and I, in conjunction with our team] created a working group that had Aboriginal elders. We…tried to determine what kind of information they wanted about their own community.”[11] This ethical and relational approach to Indigenous health research is still in practice and continual development today.[12] Amy Colquhoun, who fills the role my uncle used to, tells me that Indigenous groups sent letters to the office to express condolences for the loss of Larry as an individual and as a public servant.[13]
Larry could’ve left Edmonton, but that wouldn’t have been logical. His favourite restaurant, Sepp’s Pizza, is here. His family is here. His wife and her family are here. The Taste of Edmonton festival was within walking distance of his downtown office. Essentially, he understood the data here because he lived in relation here. He worked with collaborators from across the globe, but being situated in Edmonton allowed him to apply himself most effectively, as evidenced by the rich network of connections, his body of work[14], and the high-quality administrative health data in Alberta.
“If only Larry were here, he’d know,” my grandma always tells me. There is a degree of truth to this. It is easy to get caught up in the fallacy that one inaccessible person has all the answers. My uncle is not truly gone. He is present in everyone he mentored, collaborated with, and cared for.
Epidemiologists, statisticians, and other folks processing health data are working to use the privilege afforded to them to improve system-given care, often independent of any knowledge of my uncle. This future-oriented collaborative thinking extends beyond the scope of an individual. While my uncle is one example of what this kind of thinking can lead to, this is something we can each contribute to, starting by fostering collaboration between those we are in relation with.
Bibliography
Government of Alberta. “Using EHR Data for Research – Alberta Netcare.” Accessed December 13, 2024. https://www.albertanetcare.ca/Research.htm.
Kirwin, Erin, Shannon MacDonald, and Kimberley Simmonds. “Profiles in Epidemiology: Dr. Larry Svenson.” American Journal of Epidemiology 191, no. 4 (2022): 735-738. https://doi.org/10.1093/aje/kwab282.
Arbor Memorial. “Larry Svenson | Obituary | Sharing Memories.” Accessed December 13, 2024. https://www.arbormemorial.ca/en/evergreen/obituaries/larry-svenson/81133.html#Guestbook.
University of Alberta. “Larry Svenson | Public Health.” Accessed December 13, 2024. https://www.ualberta.ca/public-health/about/faculty-staff/adjunct-emeritus-faculty/svenson.html.
Pan-Canadian Public Health Network. “Blueprint for a Federated System for Public Health Surveillance in Canada.” Last modified February 15, 2017. https://phn-rsp.ca/en/reports-publications/blueprint-federated-system-public-health-surveillance-canada.html.
Svenson, Larry. Letter to T. 2022.
Svenson, Larry. Work Notebooks, Coil scribblers with jotted notes regarding Larry’s day-to-day tasks. 1997-2002.
Svenson, Larry. “The evolving use of administrative health data for quantifying burden of illness.” PhD thesis., Manchester Metropolitan University, 2015. https://e-space.mmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/600392
University of Alberta School of Public Health. “School of Public Health: 160 The School of Public Health.” Accessed August 31, 2024. https://www.ualberta.ca/registrar/media-library/pdfcal/10-11calendarpdf/public.pdf.
[1] Specifically, he worked with Administrative Health Data (AHD), which is “Data routinely collected as part of the operation of the healthcare system,” Larry Svenson. “The evolving use of administrative health data for quantifying burden of illness.” PhD thesis., Manchester Metropolitan University, 2015. https://e-space.mmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/600392
[2] Sexually transmitted infection.
[3] Epidemiology is the branch of medicine which deals with the incidence, distribution, and possible control of diseases and other factors relating to health.
[4] Svenson, 2015
[5] Ellen Rafferty, Personal interview with the author, August 14, 2024; Betsy Varughese, Personal interview with the author, August 12, 2024.
[6] Don Schopflocher, Personal interview with the author, July 11, 2024.
[7] Shopflocher, 2024.
[8] There are a range of papers in this box, from public service awards to track and field recognitions and Trivial Pursuit competition certificates.
[9] There will be a paper on that subject that acknowledges my uncle for being the one to ask the question (Can we predict the peak of flu season?) that sparked that area of research. Varughese, 2024.
[10] Varughese, 2024; Rafferty, 2024.
[11] Schopflocher, 2024.
[12] Rafferty, 2024
[13] Amy Colquhoun, Personal interview with the author, August 22, 2024.
[14] It is interesting to look through epidemiological journals and see “Edmonton” featured on the cover, beside my uncle’s name.
