Date Published | April 20, 2007

When I arrived in Northern Ontario nearly five years ago, I encountered two perplexing psychological obstacles in my assignment of helping to establish Canada’s first new medical school in 30 years. The first has been put to rest. But the second roadblock haunts us still.

That first challenge was in overcoming deep-seated doubts that a Medical School would ever be built in Northern Ontario. But the Northern Ontario School of Medicine is now here for all to see. And, it’s turned out to be a highly desirable place to get an education; for the third year in a row we’ve received more than 2,000 applications for the 56 positions available.

But I must admit the second difficulty is proving far more intractable. It’s the oft-repeated prophecy that NOSM could never succeed because of its two-campus model. Two Northern cities and two Northern Universities, I was told again and again, could never cooperate constructively on such a venture.

Sadly, this observation was most often made by Northerners themselves. I won’t tell you that it has always been easy, or that there aren’t challenges still to be resolved, but the fact is, NOSM is living proof of what can happen when the people of Northern Ontario think and act collaboratively rather than regard one another with suspicion and a competitive spirit.

As a matter of fact, the Medical School might never have existed had not the mayors of the North’s five largest municipalities banded together to lobby Queen’s Park. One of the School’s founders told me, when a single mayor walked the halls of the provincial legislature building, he or she might or might not receive a hearing.

But the first time that all five Northern mayors showed up to press home a single issue, the reaction from key Ministers of the day was noticeably different, and the outcome speaks for itself.

And so it is with many other Northern issues: we must begin to shape our own future, and the way we do that is by working together, rather than against each other.
I came to Canada from the Latrobe Valley in Australia. It is comprised of three principal towns of about 20,000 people each, located at intervals of 15 kilometers apart. Each community had its own small hospital, and we had become so accustomed to fighting each other for resources that the centre finally stopped allocating those resources, so weary were they of the infighting and the endless energy being expended.

In the end, it was determined that we should build and share a single, much larger centrally located hospital. Yes, some of the doctors in the outlying communities have to drive a bit further to work, but I can assure you that the health needs of the Valley are far better served by the new facility.

I know it’s hard here in the North, where the distances separating us are so great that it’s often difficult for people to identify the interests we share in common. But it’s imperative that we begin to do exactly that.

Considered separately, Northern municipalities pale very nearly into total insignificance when compared to their far larger counterparts in southern Ontario. But put together, we have a critical mass of population that actually counts for something.

In the fall of 2005, the Medical School published a commissioned report entitled Creating a Sustainable Health Research Industry in Northern Ontario. Its authors concluded that many of the factors long considered liabilities in the North could actually become a strong advantage in the creation of a health research cluster of national and even international stature.

The challenges of distance and isolation, for example, could be exploited through the development of information technology that can then be exported to other parts of the world facing similar issues.

Our sizeable Franco-Ontarian and aboriginal communities offer us special research opportunities, as does Sault Ste. Marie’s Group Health Centre, which has a patient record database of some 30,000 individuals.

But, as the report emphasized, it was imperative that Northern Ontario see itself as one cohesive whole to leverage every ounce of competitive advantage that we can muster.
Not only that, but modern technology now means that not all of the players need to be located within a single metropolitan area. It’s becoming quite feasible for a widely scattered group of collaborators to become major players in health research on the world stage.

And I’m delighted to see that we at NOSM are not the only ones thinking in this vein. The introduction of the Local Health Integration Networks, or LHINs, by the provincial government are another sign of the need to think regionally, and to integrate health services across regions and systems.

My only personal disappointment with the LHINs is that there are two, rather than one, in Northern Ontario. A single unit would have better mirrored the growing movement to integrate health research and education across the North for the good of all. Pan-Northernism, I am convinced, is and will continue to be the way of the future.

To learn more about NOSM and our efforts to improve the health of people across Northern Ontario, visit our website at www.normed.ca