I think back over the past year and I’m humbled.
What an incredible experience being President of the Ontario Medical Association was. The places I saw. The people I met. The stories I heard. The knowledge I gained. I will never forget. It has taken me time to process what was an intensely challenging, intensely rewarding year.
For those who don’t know, the OMA is the voice for all 41,000 physicians across Ontario. Being OMA President was unlike anything I had ever done before. I had held leadership positions before, but nothing, nothing of this scale and magnitude.
My year as the OMA President was the year I dared greatly. The year I learned to take a leap of faith. To fail and rise up. To serve my vision, to serve others. To always, always, always choose hope, choose faith, choose logic. To choose courage and become limitless. And it was simply amazing.
It wasn’t just meetings and committee-work in a lovely Bloor Street office. It wasn’t just shaking hands with the movers and shakers of the healthcare industry. It wasn’t just the studying I did to understand how a not-for-profit corporation functioned and functioned well. It wasn’t just the day to day work of transforming an organization and inspiring people to stay the course. It wasn’t just the members who took time from their busy lives, their challenging jobs to sit with me and talk to me about their concerns. It wasn’t just the travel to the furthest reaches of the province, tiny towns to urban sprawls. It wasn’t just the late evenings or early mornings with committees, meetings, travel and events. It wasn’t just all this. It was so much more.
I came into my own as a leader during this past year.
It was trial by fire and though I got burned and burned out, I rose up again and again. I sought counsel from those wiser than me. The OMA Board, CEO, various colleagues and co-workers became my team. My safety net. And I showed up. I got up every morning at 4:30 am sharp to saddle up and return to the job. A job I came to love. A job I became really good at.
I was committed to being the best President I could be. Given the short term – a year, a blink of an eye really – I was committed to do as much as I could. Broaden the scope of the President’s Tour. Engage members through all of the OMA’s channels. Reach out to the Indigenous community. Establish a more robust media presence. Repair and strengthen government relations. Help hire a new CEO. Be a sounding board as the OMA negotiated the first-ever arbitrated physician contract. Unify the organization even as it threatened to split apart. Fight back when the government halted arbitration. Speak before media, government and stakeholders time and again. Collaborate on the OMA’s ambitious governance reform.
Show all those watching – and there were many – that the OMA was not a house divided, but one that was home to differences of opinions. One that drew its strength from the extraordinary variety of members it served.
It was a joyful yet careful dance every single day.
There were sacrifices. I missed a year of my children’s life. I was an absentee mother, wife, daughter and friend. I put projects already in motion on the back-burner. I gained white hairs and sleepless nights. While I will never get that time back again, I don’t regret a minute of it.
When I started, I asked my colleagues to make a decision:
That despite the anxiety, the uncertainty, the covered-in-cold-sweat-heart-pounding-dry-mouth-hand-shaking-fear, I asked them to choose hope.
Choose courage.
Choose to fight,
to get up,
stand up,
step forward,
shout out,
reach farther,
be more,
think harder,
imagine bigger
and be limitless.
And I promised them – I would do the same.
Healthcare in Ontario is in trouble. Waitlists spiral out of control. Emergency departments are overcrowded. Hospitals wards are bursting at the seams. Nearly a million Ontarians are without a family doctor. Physician burnout is at its most severe. We are all in desperate need of transformation.
And transformation efforts cannot succeed without physician leadership. So I asked my colleagues to step up and I would do the same.
Looking back on it all, I am reminded of Theodore Roosevelt’s quote:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”