MOUNT HOPE:

LIFE AND DEATH AT THE HOSPITAL

Hip-replacement surgery under way at Mount Sinai Hospital: Everyone has an opinion on what the
hospital is doing and what it isn’t doing, what it needs to do and what it ought not to do.

Salvation's Army

A hospital is a high-tech, ultrapolitical, fully modern institution. Yet it is also ‘a slim net over a dark river, trying to catch souls being swept from one side to the other,’ in the words of Globe and Mail writer IAN BROWN. He and photographer KEVIN VAN PAASSEN went deep inside Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital to create a series weaving together many tales from that struggle — the true story of Canadian health care now. TODAY: Bracing for a pandemic

This is what a hospital is, among other things — life and science and politics and death, though not necessarily in that soothing order. Where else but a hospital would highly educated human beings sit in a room respectfully arguing about who does and who does not have the right to be protected against an influenza epidemic that could kill 30 million people, even as that flu is gearing up to sweep across China and into the lives of the people in the room? Where else on earth but in a hospital, with its fearless logic and tightly bound emotional range, would it be possible for a doctor to say in all seriousness that he should be protected against the flu, whereas his daughter — to say nothing of yours, buster — should not be? That’s how people who run hospitals think. Then there’s the rest of us — which brings us to the 18th-floor auditorium of Mount Sinai Hospital in downtown Toronto, and why almost everyone in the room wants to know only one thing: What about the bird flu?

Not that the meeting was supposed to go that way. Joe Mapa, the creamy-smooth president and CEO of Mount Sinai, throws this luncheon twice a year to make his board of governors feel they belong to the hospital, and vice-versa. Mount Sinai has done well by its donors, after all — one of the top teaching hospitals in North America, one of the most respected research institutions in the world, the embodiment of the strengths (and some of the weaknesses) of the Canadian health-care system, already displaying the outline of what hospital medicine will look like in 10 years. To accomplish his mission, Mr. Mapa has called in an array of his most stellar researchers and clinicians to show off the cutting-edge research and clinical work the donors have financed. Joe Mapa calls it feeding “the passion.”

There’s so much money in the audience you could practically lie down in the stuff. People with entire wings and whole buildings named after them: Joe Lebovic, the suburban home king (who with his brother, Wolf, gave $16-million), there by the sushi. . . . Murray Koffler, founder of Shoppers Drug Mart and co-founder of Four Seasons Hotels, a man who has given away $50-million in his lifetime, $10-million to Mount Sinai alone, over by the wall. . . . Hospital board chairman Lawrence Bloomberg, former First Marathon investment kingpin, and foundation chairman Eddie Sonshine, founder of RioCan Real Estate Investment Trust, perfecting their smile ’n’ scowl fundraising act (Eddie smiles, Larry scowls). . . . But when Don Low gets up to speak, everyone forgets what the other experts have said.

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