Esko Vainio leaves mark on health care

Northeastern Ontario has lost one of its foremost champions of health-care integration with the retirement of Esko Vainio, president and CEO of Timmins and District Hospital, Nov. 30.

Vainio joined Timmins and District Hospital in 1999 shortly after the provincial government's Health Services Restructuring Commission ordered the establishment of hospital networks in rural and Northern Ontario to share resources and expertise.

Network 13, serving Timmins and its catchment area, was probably the most active of the hospital clusters established by the commission.

Subsequent restructuring of the provincial health-care system led to the establishment of today's Local Health Integration Networks, but Network 13 took on a life of its own under Vainio's leadership and remains a going concern.

"It started off as a hospital network, but now it's more of a northeastern health services alliance with representation from the long-term care sector, the mental health and addiction sector, the Porcupine Health Unit, the Community Care Access Centre and others," said Vainio.

The network has also expanded geographically to include Chapleau and Kirkland Lake.

"Critical mass is important," said Vainio. "Timmins and District Hospital couldn't do a lot of things on its own because we're not big enough.

We don't have the human and financial resources, so it takes partnerships and collaboration with institutions in our area to make things happen."

One of Network 13's earliest and most successful integration initiatives was the NORrad Picture Archiving and Communication System, which started with nine hospitals and has now grown to encompass more than 20 sites. Another high profile success was the Northeastern Ontario Network, or NEON, a shared electronic medical record system. A lab cluster, a buying group, and a common employee benefit plan are other examples of integration initiatives that have emerged from the alliance of institutions and community-based services in the Timmins catchment area.

Having championed integration before it became a buzzword, the alliance is now poised to get even more creative. Armed with a $100,000 grant from the Northeast LHIN, the alliance has hired the Hay Group to survey member organizations and conduct research as a prelude to a new round of integration initiatives.

"We're used to working with each other, partnering, collaborating and integrating," said Vainio. "We're just hoping to build on that."

The passion for partnering has leapfrogged beyond the health-care sector, as is evident from the ONE U, or Ontario Northeast University initiative, chaired by Vainio and dedicated to promoting enhanced access to post graduate studies for Northerners.  The hope is that Northern-educated youth will opt to remain in the region and, over time, work in nursing, social work and other health-care roles.

One future integration opportunity, said Christine Leclair, Network 13 planner, is a united effort at recruiting health-care professionals to member communities. "That's sure to come up in discussions," she said.

Another possibility is a shared biomedical engineering capability to avoid the cost of flying in technicians from Toronto.

"When you get people around a table talking about common problems, you realize this is something we should all be doing together rather than spending our individual energies going off in different directions," said Vainio.

The concept of hospitals working together in clusters to find service improvements and efficiencies has become a fixture of the health-care system, reinforced recently by a Northeast LHIN directive requiring hospitals to meet and explore partnership opportunities as part of their operating plan deliberations. "As they sit around the table looking at their individual pressures and opportunities as a collective, some ideas may come out of that," said Terry Tilleczek, the Northeast LHIN's interim CEO.

It could be a pooling of back office administration services or buying groups to leverage better prices on supplies.

Integration, said Tilleczek, is about "enhancing access and quality, but it's also about realizing greater efficiencies because we have to look at how we are going to sustain a system that's already eating up half of the provincial budget."