School could be the tie that binds: as one school with two campuses, NOSM has the potential to bring together the northwest and the northeast.

The Northern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM), as one school with two campuses, is a symbol for unity in the North.

The first medical school to be incepted in Canada in 30 years has a lot of expectations attached to it, and a lot of potential ahead.

Beyond the medical education and the cutting-edge research activity, the school has a chance to act as a catalyst in bringing together two regions of the province that have much more in common than the distance around the north shore of Lake Superior would suggest.

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Dr. Fred Gilbert, president of Lakehead University, says he hopes the school will bring the regions closer together.

"There has always been a rivalry there that at times isn't very friendly," he says. "The institution of the medical school has the potential to ease that a bit."

Dorothy Wright is the school's CAO.

"This is one medical school for Northern Ontario," she says. "We have a chance to break new ground and demonstrate the capability of the North to come up with a Northern solution. There is a tendency to think we're in the backwoods of this province, but we have the knowledge and the ability here to retain people and build. The quality of life is here, and the medical school is one more element we can add to it, but we need the support of all its communities to do it."

Sketchy beginnings

In his three years of work to make the medical school a reality, founding dean Dr. Roger Strasser has seen a lot of the dynamic between the northeast and the northwest. The rivalry reared its ugly head early on in the exercise, helped along by some early government policy.

"The first announcement was that we'd be a Laurentian University medical school with some clinical education in Thunder Bay, in fact, without Lakehead University really involved at all," he recalls. "That led to a really strong response and uprising in the northwest about the importance of the school having a campus in Thunder Bay, and Lakehead being involved as well as Laurentian."

Strasser is no stranger to regional animosities. His last job was head of the Monarch's University School of Rural Health, based in Melbourne, Australia. That school also had several satellite offices, and research and teaching activities in many points in between.

"It is not as large as Northern Ontario, but certainly subject to the same kind of sense of difference and, at times, frictions and even antagonisms between different parts of the region I was working in."

Strasser received a crash course in Northern Ontario dynamics and the perceptions of the region's residents in his first few months here.

Paradigms and parallels

"My experience was that, when I was staying in Thunder Bay and I talked about Northern Ontario people thought I meant the northwest. When I was in Sudbury, they thought I meant the northeast. In Sudbury, there is an awareness maybe of a bit of indifference toward Thunder Bay and the northwest. But in Thunder Bay, there is a real antagonism toward Sudbury and the northeast. It's really understandable because, when you think about it, in Toronto, people hardly ever think or talk about Northern Ontario at all and, if they do, it's Sudbury and the northeast they think about. So, the northwest is in a real way sort of the forgotten part of Northern Ontario."

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At the helm of NOSM in its beginnings, Strasser had to deal with not only the historical rivalry between Thunder Bay and Sudbury and the tension between their universities, but with a growing skepticism that the school would really have any presence outside those two cities.

"There was, certainly in the early days, a fair bit of suspicion and distrust that this was serious, that it would actually develop as a real two-campus school in terms of the universities, and also that it would be more than just Sudbury and Thunder Bay," he explains.

"The very first major public event that we had for the school we held in Sault Ste. Marie in January 2003, the curriculum workshop. That was deliberately in Sault Ste. Marie to demonstrate that the school is for the whole of Northern Ontario. We invited people from right across the North to participate--anyone who had an interest was encouraged to come along."

Shooting for 200 participants, organizers were caught off-guard when they received over 500 expressions of interest.

Representatives from all over the region, from Aboriginal communities, francophone populations, remote and rural locales, health-care centres and municipal governments filled the hall to its 300-person capacity.

Learning, on the air

They probably would have heard a lot about communications via information technology (IT), videoconferencing and broadband Internet connections.

"I think that what we've started to do and what we'll be able to do further is connecting the people, faculty members, and others involved in the universities in a way that they can see and experience for themselves the advantages of working together and supporting each other," Strasser explains. "So first of all, of course, we're making enormous use of communications IT. In a very real sense, electronic communications is an essential element of the school. It's kind of like oxygen-it's all around you and you know you need it to sustain yourself, but you're not really aware of it."

But before people can start working with each other on a day-to-day basis over the Internet and the phone, Strasser says it is important for them to meet face-to-face.

The school organizes a lot of retreats and workshops for its employees, he says.

"As we recruited leaders, faculty and staff for the school, we brought them together for different kinds of workshops and retreats, where they established relationships and had got to know each other, and realized they have more in common amongst themselves than differences."

From there, it's a cinch for the employees to continue the working relationship in cyberspace.

At every level of the medical school, stress is put on the fundamental concept that NOSM is one school that happens to have two campuses, which happen to have 1,000 kilometres and most of a Great Lake between them.

"In that sense, (it is) a pan-Northern medical school that brings together the west and the east in Northern Ontario," Strasser says, and he has never been more convinced that this is the right way to go about addressing the health-care crisis in the region.

The right thing to do

"Now I've been here for a few years, so I am very strongly of the view that this approach is actually the right thing for Northern Ontario, and the whole of Northern Ontario has much to gain by the various communities and sectors working together as a unit," he asserts. "You've got a population that's a bit under 900,000, so that's a critical mass, which is relevant whether you're talking about a medical school or any other kind of major development that requires a lot of people being involved. There are great differences between the different parts of Northern Ontario, (but) the diversity really is a strength. That is something that is important to recognize, and emphasize, really. So at NOSM, what we're looking to do is involve various communities in Northern Ontario in the school in a real sense, the school is in each of those communities and each of those communities is in the school.

"They each bring something different and, from the school's point of view, different kinds of learning opportunities for our student residents."

www.normed.ca

By CRAIG GILBERT

Northern Ontario Business