Before Dr. Frances Harley began her work in Edmonton, Alberta had no dedicated system of care for infants and children suffering from kidney disease. By the time she stepped back from the field, she had built that system from the ground up, trained the physicians who would carry it forward, and extended its reach across the Northwest Territories and parts of three other provinces plus Yukon and Nunavut. In 2020, the Government of Alberta recognized her contribution with induction into the Alberta Order of Excellence.
A Calling Rooted in Family
Harley was born in London, Ontario, in 1940, the youngest of three girls, and grew up watching her mother open their home to refugees arriving after the Second World War and start a school for cognitively impaired children, an early forerunner of inclusive public education. After earning a BA from Smith College and a medical degree from the University of Western Ontario in 1965, Harley married Dr. Raul Urtasun and completed her pediatric residency in Baltimore and Montreal. The couple moved to Alberta in 1970, where Harley continued her nephrology training, splitting her time between adult patients and the infant and child program she was building from scratch.
Building a Subspecialty From Scratch
As the only pediatric nephrologist in Alberta for a stretch of years, Harley travelled constantly, attending clinics in Edmonton and Calgary and taking calls for the entire province. She learned advanced techniques by visiting centres like the University of California San Francisco, then brought that knowledge home to build a program that eventually served the Northwest Territories and parts of Yukon, Nunavut, British Columbia and Saskatchewan. She championed live donor transplants for children, partnering with the University of Minnesota’s transplant program and personally accompanying young patients south for surgery. With colleagues across the country, she helped found the Canadian Association of Pediatric Nephrology to establish shared standards of care, work documented in detail on the Alberta Order of Excellence profile for Dr. Frances Harley.
Care That Extended Beyond the Hospital
Harley pushed for changes that let sick children stay children. She persuaded the University of Alberta Hospital to offer after school and night time dialysis so young patients could attend their neighbourhood schools, and she convinced a manufacturer to produce dialysate bags a fraction of the usual size for smaller patients. She served as the first director of the University of Alberta’s cystic fibrosis clinic and later became the first woman to chair the department of pediatrics there, twice, in an acting capacity.
Harley received the Alberta Centennial Medal in 2005 and the Alberta Medical Association’s Medal for Distinguished Service in 2019, honours that reflect a career built on the belief that no child’s illness should define their future.
How many more lives could be changed if every Alberta hospital had a champion as relentless as Dr. Frances Harley?
