Introducing Our CEOs

Whether you’re speaking with clinicians, support staff, or the patients they serve, people agree that Oak Valley Health’s Markham Stouffville Hospital (MSH) isn’t just your average community hospital — it’s so much more. Oak Valley Health’s President and CEO, Mark Fam, joined MSH Foundation’s CEO, Suzette Strong, to discuss their plans for how MSH will keep pace with its ever-growing community.

I was drawn to the organization because of our “honoured to care” culture. You can feel it when you walk the halls of MSH.

Health care is an art and a science, and most hospitals have the science part down. What sets MSH apart is the art of caring that’s driven by our values and the “honoured to care” culture Mark mentions — you also notice it in every conversation our clinicians have with patients and their families.

In the early 2000s, when the community was about 200,000 people, the kinds of services the hospital needed were very different relative to larger regional centres around us. Now, at almost 500,000, we need to grow the breadth and depth of our clinical services — cardiac, kidney, stroke, and others — for care closer to home. We hope to build so we can increase capacity in ambulatory care and hospice, and expand our urgent-care service offerings in Stouffville as well.

The delivery of health care services in our growing and aging community is very different today than when we first opened in 1990. Because the hospital sits on 50 acres of land, we have a unique opportunity to expand our campus of care to meet the current and future needs of the communities we serve.

The Foundation exists to raise funds to support the hospital’s most urgent needs and strategic priorities. The government can’t fund all the costs required to provide quality care to our community, so our mission is more important than ever.

The campaign we’re in now is going to enable us to advance our clinical care, research, and academic agenda, and support building the facilities we need to grow with our community. It’s all because of the contributions of the Foundation and the community that supports us. We really appreciate it.