Every Friday at Ten

Every Friday morning, from 10:00 to 10:30, Sandy Garraway sits down at the piano in the atrium of Oakville Trafalgar Memorial Hospital and plays.

She’s the program director of cancer, pathology and laboratory medicine at Halton Healthcare, one of the most complex and far-reaching leadership roles in the hospital. She oversees programs that span diagnosis, treatment, and critical diagnostic services across the region. Her days are full and her responsibilities significant, but she always makes time to play every Friday.

For the patients sitting in waiting rooms nearby, and the families holding coffee cups they’re not really drinking, the music arrives without explanation. It doesn’t announce itself – It’s simply there like a hand on the shoulder. Present and human in a place where emotions run close to the surface.

Sandy grew up in a Welsh family of musicians and has been a church organist for years. She understands, in a way that goes beyond instinct, what it means for sound to hold people steady.

She also understands what it means to be on the other side of a cancer diagnosis. Sandy lost her younger brother to the disease. That experience never left her. It lives in the way she leads her team, in the way she stops to walk confused visitors to their destination, and in her quiet, persistent commitment to making sure that people in this community can access exceptional cancer care without leaving home to find it.

I never could have predicted how all the pieces would align,” she has said. “Now everything feels connected, and it’s incredibly rewarding to see it come together for patients and the team.

Sandy came to Halton Healthcare in 2019 as the organization’s first Director of Cancer Services, stepping into the role just before the COVID-19 pandemic reshaped everything. She watched her teams rise to meet something nobody had prepared for. That experience deepened a belief she already held: when people feel supported, and when they understand how their work connects to something larger, they do extraordinary things.

Sandy has built her career on the understanding that leadership doesn’t require you to be the expert in the room. It requires you to see people clearly, trust them fully, and make sure they know their contribution matters.

She brings that same philosophy to the piano bench.

Nobody asked Sandy to play. There’s no program, no schedule, no formal volunteer role attached to what she does. She shows up every Friday morning, rain or shine – unless a meeting can’t be moved – and offers thirty minutes of music to anyone who needs it.

That kind of care, quiet, consistent, and deeply personal, is what makes OTMH different.

Your support helps make it possible for leaders like Sandy to do this work here, close to home, for the people who need it most.