Healing Hands

As Jo Brant gears up for an historic facelift, CEO Eric Vandewall lays a fresh foundation

By James Tennant Photography by Jon Evans

• “At the end of the day it’s the contribution I can make,” says Vandewall of his role at Jo Brant. “It’s about helping others. I’ve learned that typically people aren’t in health care for the money. People are in health care because of the contribution, the impact they can make in peoples’ lives every day.”
• Eric Vandewall
• “We essentially have the same footprint today that we did in 1971,” Vandewall notes, “Yet Burlington and the surrounding community has grown significantly. That’s placing demands and pressures on our system.”

Joseph Brant Memorial Hospital is, in a very real sense, a community hospital. That’s entirely literal, too: Jo Brant was founded in the late 1950s by a group of local citizens “eager for a community hospital.” In 1961, they opened their doors to the population of Burlington and surrounding area.

Yet it’s a community hospital in other ways, too – and not just because a public relations department likes the warm and fuzzy sound of the word. Burlington rallies around the hospital in support. Businesses proudly mention their involvement in the hospital’s fundraising initiatives. Joseph Brant is a smaller hospital that serves a smaller city, which means that its close-knit staff and volunteers are also closely knit into the fabric of the community they serve.

It’s this sense of community that makes Eric Vandewall so enthusiastic about Joseph Brant.

“It’s amazing when staff are telling you that the sense of community is important for them,” says the Joseph Brant’s new President and CEO. “It’s something they value and they’d like to see it preserved as part of the culture of the organization. It was pleasantly surprising to discover. I hadn’t worked in an environment like that before.”

The affable and articulate Vandewall has found his new family eager to welcome him into the fold. For his part, Vandewall is neither reticent nor aloof with his new team; in fact, he has initiated personal contact with individual members of the Board, the senior team, directors and managers. Likewise, he has been holding focus groups with physicians, staff and volunteers. The greater part of his learning curve has been immersing himself in the hospital and its people, in order to better understand the present and chart a course into the future for the organization.

“My goal is to make sure that I‘ve heard from at least 100 frontline staff,” he says. “For me it has been about listening, learning, developing relationships and getting the sense of the culture of the organization.”

Former Joseph Brant CEO Don Scott left JBMH after a healthy 21-year run. In his wake, Vandewall sees an opportunity to engage. He has presented himself as a new face, with new energy, open-minded to the insights, views, opinions, ideas and suggestions of those who make up the Joseph Brant community.

“There is readiness for change across this organization,” he says. “When you’re coming in new and looking to make changes, that’s half the battle, so to speak. It’s human behaviour not to gravitate towards change. When the organization is ready for change and wants to participate in change, that’s fantastic.”

There have been more than a few bumps the road for Jo Brant in recent years. After weathering the fallout of the C. difficile outbreak and facing increasing budgetary pressures, the beleaguered institution was in need of change, if only to invigorate its people. Vandewall, who describes himself as a “glass half-full kind of guy,” sees the hospital’s recent trouble as opportunity rather than stumbling block. Out of challenge and crisis, positive change can occur more easily.

Vandewall has stated publicly that his plan is to increase safety and standards of care while cutting the deficit. It sounds like a tall order, but he seems to have no doubts that the challenge can be met even while he admits that the task is not a small one. These are not only challenging times for Joseph Brant, but challenging times for health care across the province and indeed the nation. Health care has grown beyond the rate of inflation, and sustainability of the system is an issue.

Yet positive change has already begun at Jo Brant. They are on track to have a balanced budget, despite starting the year in a deficit position. This allows the hospital to look into the future from a brighter vantage point. There’s plenty to look forward to, and there are major plans for the growth and sustainability of JBMH. For example, Vandewall is eager to engage the community actively around the upcoming redevelopment and expansion project.

To modernize the facilities and ensure that Joseph Brant can care for those in its ever-growing neighbourhood, the plan calls for a complete replacement of the hospital over a 20- to 25-year period, at a total projected cost of over $300 million. There’s a plan to redevelop the existing facility on the current site, and to include growth and expansion as well. At this stage, it is crucial to engage the community, and to garner community support for fundraising by educating people about the project – why it is so important to the future of the institution and even future quality of life in Burlington and surrounding areas.

“This organization dates back to 1961, and this hospital was actually built by a group of citizens,” he says. “We essentially have the same footprint today that we did in 1971, yet Burlington and the surrounding community has grown significantly. That’s placing demands and pressures on our system. We’re providing quality care, service, but we’re doing it with antiquated and functionally obsolete facilities that were not designed for the purposes that we’re working with today.”

While currently a Burlington resident, Vandewall was born in Sudbury and raised in Mississauga. A graduate of Ryerson, he originally obtained a degree in architectural sciences, majoring in project management. Based on that foundation, one wouldn’t imagine that Vandewall would complete a Masters in Public Administration and Health Policy at Queen’s many years later. Yet he did follow a logical if unexpected trajectory from architect to health care professional; Vandewall’s work in architecture and project management led him to work on many different types of structures, and his experience led to an opportunity in the Ministry of Health. His contract involved planning the construction for psychiatric hospitals, and success with that project led to a continued working relationship with the Ministry.

“I was quite young at the time, and naive to bureaucracies,” Vandewall recalls. “The next thing you know there was a ‘reorganization’ and I was responsible for the biggest hospitals in the country.”

Despite the steep learning curve – Vandewall recalls barely being able to comprehend the jargon in the earliest proposals – he was challenged and intrigued by the position. Over the course of 11 years, he experienced several roles with the Ministry of Health, ranging from working with hospitals to helping create innovative health care delivery models. Along the way, Vandewall became well-versed in provincial issues, policy operations, hospital culture and health promotion. In his final posting with the Ministry, Vandewall was called upon to create a team that backed up the Health Services Restructuring Commission – the Commission gave the orders, and Vandewall’s team helped the hospitals comply.

After the Ministry of Health, Vandewall’s career track led to GlaxoSmithKline, where he worked in partnership with Queen’s University (little did he know he was getting a first glimpse of the city he would live in, and even the graduate program he would study, years later). The goal of the Queen’s/GSK partnership was to create an integrated stroke program, “basically creating a regional protocol that would improve stroke care for patients.” The work they did served as a basis for the regional stroke systems across the province today.

At GlaxoSmithKline, Vandewall was able to see an entirely different side of health care, this time from the standpoint of the private sector. After he finished there, he positioned himself to learn yet another aspect of Canadian health care, this time from within a hospital, as he joined the Trillium Health Centre as VP of Planning and Corporate Services. His job was also to establish a project management office and oversee redevelopment, which brought his career full-circle.

“I feel quite privileged to have the experience I do,” says Vandewall. “Government, private sector and public sector experience. Not many people get to view our working system from those different lenses or perspectives.”

All of this experience has helped Vandewall achieve his career goal of becoming a hospital CEO. Yet for him, being the main man at Joseph Brant is not merely a “career goal.”

“At the end of the day it’s the contribution I can make,” says Vandewall. “It’s about helping others. I’ve learned that typically people aren’t in health care for the money. People are in health care because of the contribution, the impact they can make in peoples’ lives every day.”

Vandewall manages to find time to make an impact on his own family as well. His wife and three boys – aged 17, 13 and 2 – spend much of their time keeping fit and active, participating in sports together. Vandewall is an avid water-skier, and his entire family skis slalom courses; his middle son is into wakeboarding. Summers are spent at the cottage in the Kawarthas or on the Grand River. When the weather turns to winter, the family snowboards together as well.

“We keep active, which is important,” he smiles. “And, to put the plug in, many of the diseases we’re facing every day are preventable. Diabetes, cancers, and it all relates back to diet, physical exercise, appropriate consumption of alcohol and not smoking.” These unsolicited health tips come across as neither condescending nor preachy. They’re words of conviction. Health care is Vandewall’s profession and passion. Then there’s that passion for giving back, and his appreciation for community in general. Eight years ago, when looking at Burlington as a place to move his family, Vandewall was drawn by what he perceived to be similarities to Kingston. Like Kingston, Burlington sits on the waterfront – important for a family who are so comfortable on the water. More than that, however, was Burlington’s self-defined and distinct personality.

“Burlington has not blurred into the malaise of what’s known as the GTA,” he says. “I don’t meant that critically, but Burlington has a very unique and distinct identity, as Kingston does. That really appealed to me because a sense of community and a very strong commitment to community was loud and clear when we first located here.”

Now Vandewall and his family have lived in Burlington for eight years and have come to enjoy all the aspects that drew them to the city in the first place. Still, he feels as though he has not truly come to know his adopted town, having spent much more of his time in Mississauga and south Etobicoke while working at Trillium. “I lived here but spent much of my time in another community,” Vandewall explains. “I know that community better than I know my own. I didn’t know a lot about Burlington, didn’t spend a lot of time here doing social things or giving back to the community in different ways.”

Things have begun to change, of course, since Vandewall took over the position at Joseph Brant. He has begun to meet with local leaders and members of the community that he hadn’t previously, and considers himself “privileged and thankful for that honour every day.” While he often had the chance to meet with such people in his previous position, it wasn’t in his own community – it was in a different city. After eight years, Vandewall is excited to delve deeper into the community he calls home. He wants to get to know the city and its people. And as he gets to know Burlington, so Burlington will get to know him.

“Trillium is in a very big community, in comparison to Burlington, so at times you are actually quite anonymous,” he says. “Here, I’m not anonymous. I’m becoming more and more visible as the days go on – and that feels good.”