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Keynote Speeches

2008 Annual General Meeting Tuesday, June 24th   Message from Cliff Nordal, President and Chief Executive Officer London Health Sciences Centre

Check against delivery.

Thank you Doug. Welcome everyone. It is a pleasure to be here with you at South Street Hospital in the Education Building, formerly known as the Victoria School of Nursing and Nurses Residence. This building and in particular Holdsworth Auditorium is a unique venue that is steeped in the history of Victoria Hospital, the School of Nursing and the Gartshore Nurses Residence.

The Nursing School was established in 1883 and at the time was only the third such school in Canada. Nurses lived in the hospital during their training until the residence officially opened in 1905. Over the years Holdsworth Auditorium has been a place for celebrations, dances, hospital volleyball leagues, telethons, long service awards, meetings, luncheons, VIP visits, news conferences, and even a play centre for the daycare next door. Of all the visitors and users of Holdsworth, I wonder how many ever thought “Who is Holdsworth?” A prominent doctor? A generous donor? A grateful patient?

Well, we wanted to know and the plaque by the entrance that many of us have walked by hundreds of times proved to be a good starting point for our investigation.

Thanks to Victoria School of Nursing graduates and retired nurses, Miss Annabelle Sells and Miss Margaret Densmore, as well as Mr. Arthur McClelland, a London Room Librarian, we have learned a great deal about Miss Ione Holdsworth, a 1928 nursing graduate.

In 1940, Byron Lee Thurber, a former Canadian who made a fortune in the South African diamond mines, was a patient of Victoria Hospital suffering from gall bladder troubles and malaria. Ione was one of three nurses who cared for Mr. Thurber. In gratitude, he later asked each of the nurses to come to South Africa for a year's expense-paid holiday as his guest. Only Nurse Holdsworth accepted.

The voyage to Johannesburg by sea was her first trip abroad and on the way she became acquainted with the captain of the ship. Romance blossomed and some time later when the ship was scheduled to return to Capetown, Miss Holdsworth borrowed Mr. Thurber's car to drive down and meet the captain. Tragically, there was a serious car accident and Miss Holdsworth was killed instantly.

As you can imagine, the diamond merchant was horrified and in his will he bequested $50,000 to Victoria Hospital to be used for a suitable memorial to Ione Holdsworth. In 2007 dollars, Thurber’s bequest was worth about $400,000. His request was snagged when the hospital found it could not get the money out of South Africa where Mr. Thurber's estate was settled. But after pulling international banking strings for more than a year, the hospital received just over $27,000 in 1956. Thurber’s donation was used during the Nursing School expansion, and in 1962 this auditorium was built and named in honour of Nurse Ione Holdsworth.

This is a poignant story that perhaps was at risk of being lost to future generations of LHSC staff and physicians. While progress is necessary it is also important that we make an effort to cherish and celebrate the (133) one hundred and thirty-three years of care London Health Sciences Centre has provided to this community. And that is one of the reasons why we are holding our Annual General Meeting in this location.

Of course, it goes without saying that we are indebted to those who have shared this and many other remarkable stories, including the generous donations of artifacts, year books, letters and other memorabilia from former nurses and their families. Our nursing school grads have always done an outstanding job of honouring their history.

Just recently, Lori and Don Hoad made a significant donation to our archives. The Hoads are the family of the late Shirley Elizabeth Allen Carscallen, who graduated in June of 1942 and was also the class valedictorian. Thank you for joining us today.

We learned from the Hoad’s donation that Queen Victoria’s granddaughter attended the 1942 nursing school graduation ceremonies. Her Royal Highness Princess Alice resided in Canada during World War Two with her husband, Prince Alexander, who was Canada’s Governor-General from 1940 to 1946.

I hope that all of you were able to view and explore the memorabilia on display in this room. We have a unique partnership with Museum London that ensures important artifacts are properly maintained and we delighted to bring these items out of storage for your viewing today.

It is clear that our rich history is full of life changing moments, which is the theme of today’s AGM and Annual Report. Whether we are looking back or looking forward, LHSC continues to build on its strong tradition of being a world class health care facility providing compassionate care to patients and their families. It’s a tradition that we can all be proud of.

PAUSE

As our Board Chair, Doug Alexander mentioned earlier, his two year term as Chair is coming to an end. I would like to sincerely thank him for his ongoing commitment to good governance, financial stewardship and high quality health care.

Like all members of London Health Sciences Centre’s Board of Directors, Doug has dedicated his talent, expertise and countless hours to ensuring LHSC is advancing healthcare in our community. I want all of you to know that as your Board Chair, Doug has gone many extra miles to ensure LHSC’s success. Thank you Doug! (lead applause)

I would like to welcome our incoming Board Chair, Bob Siskind. I know how excited Bob is about his new volunteer role and I look forward to working with him and the entire Board this year.

And of course, I need to also thank the Board of Directors at St. Joseph’s Health Care. As you know, the shared CEO role was created by the Boards of both LHSC and St. Joe’s in 2006. It was a bold, innovate and perhaps even experimental move. But the overall results speak to an unprecedented level of integration and shared accomplishments between two major teaching hospitals in Ontario.

It is through the on-going collaboration and support of both Boards that St. Joseph’s and LHSC are working more closely than ever before to meet the healthcare needs of our community and region.

This integration has been facilitated by the completion this year of our leadership transition. In 2006 we modified our leadership structure to create the shared position of Chief Operating Officer, as well as the Integrated Vice President Clinical Support Services position. In the fall of 2007 we created and filled the role of Integrated Vice President, Planning and Operational Improvement.

In addition, we integrated the majority of vice president roles with those at St. Joseph’s with the exception of the senior leadership roles for the London Regional Cancer Program, Women’s and Children’s Services and of course our Foundations.

From the boardroom to the bedside, this year has been one of recruitment success. As you know there is a worldwide shortage of health care professionals. It is a testament to the reputation of London Health Sciences Centre as a centre for caring, innovation and teaching, that we have been able to recruit over 500 new nurses since January 2007. In addition, almost 50 new physicians joined LHSC in 2007 – 2008. We are pleased to welcome all of this new talent to LHSC.

We have other successes this year including two Canadian firsts, one North American first and one world first. LHSC has a strong tradition of medical breakthroughs that make a positive difference to patients not only in our community but throughout the world. You can read more about the medical and research innovations happening at LHSC in the Annual Report on pages seventeen to twenty-eight.

This past year we also reached out to our community in other ways. In October, LHSC hosted the first ever patient safety summit for Southwestern Ontario. Over 200 staff and physicians attended the conference, entitled “Some is not a number, soon is not a time.” The key objective of the conference was to advocate and champion safe patient care for every patient every day and expert speakers were joined by members of the community who provided a family perspective on patient safety.

As London’s largest employer, we provided over 350 grade nine students with an inside look at the multitude of career opportunities during Take Our Kids to Work Day.

We launched Ecological Stewardship Awareness Week to showcase our award winning program that takes a holistic approach to reducing the impact of LHSC’s operations on the environment. Since 2003 we have reduced carbon dioxide emission by 12 million kilograms and we are working towards new goals around waste reduction and green procurement. Today, we consciously choose to provide pitchers of water and fully compostable environmental cups for your beverages instead of plastic water bottles.

We also celebrated the volunteer contributions of our staff and physicians. The President’s Award for Outstanding Volunteer Community Service is an award that recognizes annually an individual at LHSC whose volunteer achievement has made a difference to the lives of people in our community

I am pleased to report that this month we presented Jan De Rose, a physiotherapist at Victoria Hospital with the second annual President’s Award for Outstanding Volunteer Community Service. Through her volunteer efforts with the London Ski Club and the May Court Club of London, Jan has demonstrated dedication, enthusiasm and leadership and has truly made a difference to the lives of people in our community. Jan – please stand to be recognized.

As always I am amazed by the amount of volunteerism that happens at all levels of our organization - LHSC is a hospital of caring people who keep on giving even when their shift is over.

Of course, it is no surprise that our physicians and staff continue to receive positive feedback from patients and families for the spirit of caring and compassion they demonstrate at the bedside, and the Ontario Hospital Association’s patient satisfaction surveys bear this out as we received some of the highest scores in the province regarding patient satisfaction.

One of the ways we are seeking to enhance the patient care experience is through our website. After extensive research and focus groups, last July we launched a newly designed website that meets the information needs of our patients and other visitors to the website and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.

We also created a new page on our website to enhance health care accountability by providing users with easy access to information about hospital governance and operations. While the corporate site has been fully updated we are now moving through the process of updating all of the thousands of pages of information on the various program and services sites to enhance the navigation and usability of our entire website. I encourage you to visit the website and give us your feedback. You can also check out this year’s Annual Report on-line.

We also spent much of the past year looking to enhance other dimensions of the patient care experience, specifically optimizing access to care. On almost a daily basis we are faced with a shortage of acute care beds, resulting in canceled surgeries, long waits in our Emergency Departments and even placing patients in hospital corridors for care.

We have been addressing this challenge on multiple fronts throughout our hospital sites using a combination of approaches. We engaged external expertise for several months and mobilized internal project teams to develop the best available tools and techniques for enhancing the flow of patients through our Emergency Rooms, admitting and in-patient units. This work is ongoing and we have made progress.

A daily metrics tool has been implemented to provide a clear, web based snapshot of key performance indicators across LHSC. As a result of predictive discharge improvements, the percentage of inpatients discharged by 11 am has increased from 8 to 23 per cent and the percentage of inpatients discharged by 2 pm has increased from 60 to 70 percent. The average daily number of surgeries cancelled due to a lack of an available bed was reduced by 50%.

However, improving patient access is not an issue unique to our hospital and we are counting on system-level strategies to help to ensure patients are in the right care setting at the right time and that more of our acute care bed capacity is available to those patients needing acute care. We work daily with our partners at the CCAC to find appropriate community –based care options for our patients.

And we are actively advocating to the Southwest Local Health Integration Network (LHIN) for immediate interim solutions including funding for transition care beds within St. Joe’s Parkwood Hospital, transitional funding for patients to stay in nursing homes, geriatric emergency nursing support, more home care support and funding for hospitalists.

We have other challenges of course including significant cost pressures. The good news is that we have resolved several debt issues and submitted a balanced budget for next year – allowing us to create a more stable operating environment for LHSC programs. However, rising costs for food, fuel and electricity, medicine, equipment, and so on, will significantly outpace the anticipated inflation funding we will receive.

Nevertheless we are committed to maintaining our financial health with balanced budgets, clear performance commitments and planned capital investment. I am looking forward to working with our government partners and funders to continue to secure a strong financial future for London Health Sciences Centre.

Our strong future includes receiving the government’s go ahead to complete the interior of the North Tower at Victoria Hospital and associated work. I am happy to report that the preparation for construction has begun in earnest and we are that much closer to completing a major redevelopment milestone and to providing our patients with the best facilities we can offer, along with the exception care they already received. We thank Infrastructure Ontario and the Ministry of Health and Long Term Care for the support and the confidence it has placed in our hospital and staff.

Finally I’d like to close my remarks today by talking about strategic directions and our values. Under the sponsorship of our Board of Directors, the senior leadership of London Health Sciences Centre has renewed the strategic directions for the hospital.

Given our extensive performance improvement efforts and the changes in Ontario’s health system, a refresh of our plan became essential. We will be building upon and enhancing our processes for performance monitoring and accountability with this new strategic plan. The plan defines our priorities and sets clear, measurable goals. Ongoing performance monitoring and an annual renewal of the plan will help us to adjust our course toward our objectives over time.

The implementation of our plans will be guided in part by our new core values, as they define how we work together and how we serve others.

Based on research and consultation with our staff and carried out by an excellent project team, we have articulated three core values: respect, trust and collaboration. Each of these values is supported by behavioural statements, to help describe how each of us lives our values at work. Clear core values are known to be fundamental to sustaining high quality service and the progress of organizations in general.

Defined by our values – Respect – Trust – Collaboration, our hospital’s motivation is clear – Caring for You. Innovating for the World. Those two phrases Caring for You. Innovating for the World caught the imagination of many of our staff, physicians, and members of the community, when we asked them what they thought about our proposed tagline as part of the brand development consultations.

Focus group sessions validated for us that LHSC’s uniqueness can be summed up in the statement Caring for you. Innovating for the World. LHSC staff and physicians provide compassionate care to our patients, while also contributing to the future of health care by teaching students from around the world, by conducting ground breaking research, and by delivering medical firsts with global impact.

Let me give you a real life example of this impact. As many of you may know, U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy has been diagnosed with a brain tumour and was recently operated on by a leading neurosurgeon at Duke University Medical Centre. We send our best wishes to Senator Kennedy and we are pleased to note that his surgeon Dr. Allen Friedman, a native of Chicago, did a one year clinical fellowship in neurosurgery in 1980 at our very own University Hospital.

Our new tagline, launched here today, is very meaningful to me. When combined with our strategic directions and our new core values, it can serve to better articulate who we are, and help us to reach out to our community, patients and external partners more effectively.

In closing, reading through the Annual Report highlights the many signs of progress at LHSC. From recruitment successes, medical and research breakthroughs, and new facility construction and renovation, the accomplishments are extensive.

For many of our patients, their stay at LHSC is often the result of a life changing moment. The Annual Report features just a handful of patient stories from our Mental Health, Orthopaedics and Women’s Care programs. We can all take pride in today’s London Health Sciences Centre - a hospital that continues its tradition of caring for the community and innovating for the world. Indeed it is LHSC’s dual role as both a community hospital and a world class medical facility that makes this hospital such a special place in the hearts and minds of Londoners.

Our Board members, leaders, physicians, researchers, staff, students, and volunteers are always at the centre of all we do. I wish to thank them for their commitment to the patients and families that we serve.
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