As you all know from my Looking Ahead last week, I was in the Middle East with Ontario's Minister of Health Dr. Eric Hoskins and a delegation of other Ministry and hospital representatives. This was a superbly organized trip which afforded me the opportunity to learn more about the current business climate in the region – specifically in the U.A.E and Kuwait – and to reacquaint myself with key state and government officials. Many of the officials I met with were impressed by UHN's international partnership model and were interested in discussing future collaboration, education and training possibilities. Part of last week's visit was also devoted to meetings in Kuwait to showcase Princess Margaret's partnership with the Kuwait Cancer Control Centre and to further conversations about a possible 5 year renewal to our engagement. Our meetings went very well and the support of Minister Hoskins was much appreciated by the Kuwaitis and by UHN.
This is an exciting week as we are holding the celebration of The Michener Institute's integration with UHN on Wednesday, February 3. To mark the occasion, there is a story in today's Globe and Mail entitled Health Care Education for the Future, the first of three articles scheduled to run in the Globe this month on the integration and how this will benefit healthcare, students and patients today and in the future. This part of our organization is now known as the Michener Institute of Education at UHN, a name that will become familiar to everyone over the coming months. The UHN website now has a page
here and through that page you can see Michener's website.
Also this week – The Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation has their launch for the NoHairSelfie campaign on February 4 at 11:00 am in the Research Atrium at Princess Margaret. This is the second year for this event and it is encouraging to see that what started here has now grown to include South Africa, the United States, Israel and Switzerland in 2016, so we are now global. If you would like to participate or understand a bit more about the event, click
here which will take you to the website. February 4 was selected as the launch day for the fundraiser because it is World Cancer Day; an occasion which we will be celebrating in a number of ways this week.
Peter
