Date Published | April 20, 2007

This premiere issue of the Northern Ontario Medical Journal is a natural extension of the evolving health-care community in Northern Ontario.

Focused on the people, places, institutions and research across the North, it is meant to be a morale booster, an information portal and a means of bringing the northern region together through stories of innovation, success, challenges and solutions.

Profiling the work by Dr. Amadeo Parissenti and the team at Sudbury Regional Hospital’s Regional Cancer Program - innovative research that is shedding new light on why some patients respond well to chemotherapy drugs while others do not - is one example of the type of stories covered in this premiere issue.

And the Northern Ontario School of Medicine welcoming its first group of residents is surely music to many ears here in the North.

There is an interesting article by Dr. David Posen on why it is so very important for health-care workers to learn successful stress management practices and achieve a healthy work -life balance.

As well, in these pages, Dr. Rayudu Koka sheds light on some of the issues relating to the mental health care system in the North and how lobbying the government over a period of years proved successful in delivering a more effective level of care for society’s most vulnerable.

With the creation of the Northern Ontario School of Medicine, the Thunder Bay and Sudbury regional cancer centres, the modernization of our largest hospitals and the emergence of exciting technologies and procedures, there is no better time for a publication that brings the region’s medical community together.

Our companion web site, www.mednorth.ca, will feature the contents of this magazine as well as other stories that you will not find in the printed version. This journal will be published quarterly and distributed across the North.

We invite you to contact us directly with story ideas, distribution requests or for more information. You can reach our editor, Norm Tollinsky, at ntollinsky@mednorth.ca. Please also feel free to contact me at pmills@nob.on.ca or by phone at 1-800-757-2766 ext. 357.

We hope that you find this inaugural issue interesting and informative.

Patricia Mills
Publisher