There was no place for sleepyheads at The Ottawa Hospital Foundation’s 22nd President’s Breakfast held this morning at The Westin Ottawa.
The venue was alive and buzzing with conversation and connections as this year’s fundraiser brought public servants together with business folks to create a super-charged “power breakfast”. It involved 600 community leaders striving to reach a fundraising goal of $750,000 in support of The Ottawa Hospital.
The two-hour event was co-chaired by Mark Noonan, vice chair of Deloitte Canada, and Lisa-Marie Inman, executive director of the Secretariat of the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians. They were joined by a team of volunteer table captains resembling medical superheroes in their white lab coats.
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For Ginger Bertrand, some of her earliest childhood memories in Ottawa are centred around healthcare. “I grew up across the street from what was originally the General Hospital,” she explains,
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Supporters could also tune in virtually and watch the red carpet-style interviews conducted by former television journalist Joanne Schnurr, who’s now working with The Ottawa Hospital (TOH) Foundation.
Currently, local residents are living through an historic development for the city with the construction of TOH’s new $2.8-billion campus, to be built over the next several years at Dow’s Lake. There’s a small catch: the community needs to raise $500 million. The Campaign to Create Tomorrow fundraising campaign is being led by one of Ottawa’s most prominent business leaders and award-winning volunteer fundraisers and philanthropists, Roger Greenberg, who was at this morning’s breakfast. The campaign now stands at $294 million of its $500-million goal, the foundation confirmed today.
“This is a monumental build and to make it a reality we all need to step forward to show our support,” Noonan, who recently joined the board of The Ottawa Hospital Foundation, told the room at the fundraiser.
Among the attendees were former prime minister Joe Clark and Maureen McTeer. They were invited by their daughter, Catherine Clark, president of her own communications company and a member of The Ottawa Hospital’s board of governors. She also hosted such guests as Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe, former Ottawa Senators captain Daniel Alfredsson, and Dr. Kwadwo Kyeremanteng, author of his newly published book Unapologetic Leadership.
TOH Foundation’s board chair Janet McKeage, from RBC Wealth Management, was there, recovering from a broken foot. But, as she’ll tell you, the care she got at The Ottawa Hospital was excellent.
The Ottawa Hospital’s president and CEO, Cameron Love, shared with everyone what the future of health care will look like at the new campus, which is expected to be one of the most modern in North America. The design was recently featured at the 2023 European Healthcare Design conference in London, U.K.
He told his audience how every patient will have their own private room, including space for loved ones to stay the night, as well as private and accessible washrooms and showers. Each room will have a smart digital screen.
Patients will also have floor-to-ceiling windows in their room. As well, there will be designated spaces for spiritual reflection, ceremony and healing.
Attendees heard about plans to design a climate-resistant hospital that will reduce carbon emissions, save water, conserve energy, reduce waste and be accessible to all forms of sustainable and green transportation.
“Last but not least, the new campus will include a significant expansion of our research and innovation work,” said Love. “The reality is, new discoveries in health care are the key to the future treatments, not only just for our community but globally.”
The new research building will house Canada’s leading neuroscience centre, as well as an innovation hub. Said Love: “This will be an environment that will enable our teams to significantly advance research discoveries and implement their approaches using artificial intelligence and digital technology.”
TOH remains one of the top three leading research hospitals in Canada, the room heard. The hospital employs 17,000 people and expects its new campus to be a draw for top physicians, nurses and researchers from around the globe, said Love. “We’ve already recruited more than 2,000 new doctors and nurses to TOH over the last 18 months.”
Love said the new campus is “truly an exciting project” for the community. The first phase is ongoing with the construction of the parking garage. Preparations are underway for starting work on the main building, he added. “We hope to have an announcement in the coming months about the firm that will be building the new hospital.”
Among the speakers that morning was Holly Wagg, who lost her wife, Julia, 36, to an aggressive form of leukemia in 2017. Wagg did a beautiful job sharing her story, from her wife’s diagnosis to her treatment at TOH to her eventual passing at the hospital. Wagg said her wife had been surrounded by all the people who loved her most, and slipped away during a bedtime ritual that involved reading to their young daughter. It had been a Harry Potter book, the fourth in the series.
“This was the end of Julia’s incredible life here on Earth but not the end of her story,” said Wagg, who spoke of a gift that her wife left in her will in support of research at The Ottawa Hospital. Wagg has done the same, in honour of Julia.
“Being part of life-saving research was important to both of us,” said Wagg. “At the time, treatment protocols for AML (acute myelogenous leukemia) hadn’t really changed in 20 years. We wanted to do whatever we could to make sure other families never had to experience what we did.
“It didn’t take long to first-hand see the difference that research can make, and see how research can tell a different story for a different family,” said Wagg while sharing a more recent case of a young woman diagnosed with the same cancer as Julia, but whose life was ultimately saved by CAR T-cell therapy, a type of cancer immunotherapy treatment.
“When Julia and I made this gift in our will to The Ottawa Hospital, this is exactly the kind of research advancement that we had hoped to see. It was the kind of happy ending that Julia wanted to write, the kind of happy ending that I would have wanted for our story.”
