Popular golf tournament working on its second million in support of the North Bay Regional Health Centre Foundation
BayToday Success articles share positive stories about successful initiatives, events, and developments within our community and the people behind them.
This month, we take a look at a Charity Golf Gala, which has been raising money for important healthcare projects for the North Bay Regional Health Centre (NBRHC) Foundation for nearly three decades.
This year, the 27th Annual Osprey Links Charity Golf Gala, sponsored by Foraco Canada, raised more than $90,000 towards the purchase of much-needed transport ventilators, “a lifeline for patients who are unable to breathe on their own.”
“These transport ventilators serve every patient from babies to older adults. And so, they provide breathing support for patients when they’re being moved within our hospital, or to other hospitals,” shared Tammy Morison, President, NBRHC Foundation.
Whether the cause is trauma, illness, surgery, or a chronic disease, the machines are used on many units within the hospital, including the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, the Critical Care Unit, and the Emergency Department.
As it happens, several existing ventilators used at the hospital are nearing the end of their intended service lifespan.
“We need five of them and they’re $50,000 each, so we made a nice little dent. We’ve almost got two transport ventilators purchased to serve our community,” Morison added following the tournament.
“It was Peter Minogue and Mike Harris who started this tournament. They hosted this golf tournament to celebrate the opening of Osprey Links Golf Course and also to raise funds for a worthy charity, and they chose at that time to help build our new hospital. So, way back 27 years ago, they were thinking about the future and the future of healthcare in our community and in our region,” Morison explained.
“Initially, after the funding of the new hospital, we had raised funds for mental health programs at our hospital, and that was for quite a few years.”
Just last year, money raised from the Golf Gala helped support another important project for the region.
“We were working on our nuclear medicine project. Our community raised $4.3 million for that major upgrade, transformational project. So, this event, along with other major donors and donors all across our community, helped to make it happen because every donation counts,” stated Morison.
“We also spent quite a few years working on our Cancer Care Close to Home campaign. So, we raised funds for cancer care across our hospital, and that would mean diagnostic and treatment and palliative care, so the MRI, the CT scanners, chemotherapy, telemedicine, pain pumps, you name it. Anything that touched a patient who was diagnosed with cancer and was receiving some kind of treatment or intervention, and surgery, of course, a lot of surgery. That campaign and this tournament helped fund a lot of that.”
As the Foundation President and CEO, Morison is grateful for all the support received through donations and fundraising efforts.
“We are really lucky because we get to see the work of the hospital through the eyes of our patients. And so, every single day we have patients coming to our Foundation wanting to demonstrate their gratitude in a meaningful way, whether it is making a memorial donation, making a grateful family donation for the care they or their loved one received. We get incredible stories, and we know that equipment is important, but all of those stories circle back to people; they circle back to nurses, porters, environmental services, surgeons, doctors, volunteers, the people they see in the hospital that maybe helped them when they needed it,” explained Morison.
The community has an important role to play in the success of the hospital.
“So, when you put that community piece in there, it means that we can fund things that maybe didn’t make the budget in a given year, or for example, our nuclear medicine project was to take place over two fiscal years because it included a major renovation and massive equipment. And because of our community support and the donors, we were able to fund that, so it could be accomplished in one year. So, this is just an example of impact.”
The Foundation has a number of projects on deck. Watch for the start of a new campaign.
“We have several projects that are on the go, but when we start looking at this tournament in January, we’ll take a look at where we’re at in terms of specific projects and figure out what we’re going to do with this tournament next year.”
Reflecting back over the years, the tournament has made a significant contribution to the Foundation and the work it continues to do for the region.
“The year before last, we celebrated more than one million dollars (in tournament money) and so now we’re working on the second million,” laughed Morison.
