The Sudbury Star is the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper.
Four community leaders came together Tuesday at a chamber of commerce event to share their thoughts on what makes Sudbury an attractive place to live and what will enhance its culture and economy going forward.
Sean Murray, head of pediatrics at Health Sciences North, said his dream is to create a freestanding medical facility for children in Sudbury.
“I really want to inspire the City of Greater Sudbury, and our rural communities as well, to try to improve health care for children, who unfortunately often get left in the mix of everything else that goes on,” he said.
Murray said he had performed a procedure earlier in the day on a boy who has chronic medical issues, including autism spectrum disorder, and was suffering from headaches. “I had to stick a needle into his back to take spinal fluid out and measure how much pressure was in his brain,” he said.
But since the boy has particular sensitivities to needles and crowds of people, the procedure had to be done in OR. “It really highlighted for me the importance of having something that is child-friendly,” he said. “We need to minimize those types of traumas that kids go through.”
He wants to see the development of a Northeastern Ontario Centre for Kids that would function under the umbrella of Health Sciences North. “That’s really where my heart and soul lies at the moment,” said the pediatrician.
It isn’t only adults who have chronic health needs, he stressed. “Most people see children as healthy and playing,” he said. “But the reality is that as time goes on, we have a huge issue with chronic illness in children, not just medically but in the behavioural and psychological context. We have a lot of kids who struggle with different aspects of life.”
Murray pointed out the cancer centre took shape in Sudbury because patients previously had to travel great distances for treatment. “I will tell you that children travel far more than adults ever have and ever did,” he said.
Specialized care for kids exists, but it is “marginalized” and spread out into “little pockets and silos across the country,” said the physician.
“We’re not trying to reinvent ourselves to the point of emulating the Hospital for Sick Children (in Toronto), but simply want to bring enough resources to bear so that children can stay at home and receive the care that they deserve,” he said.
John Gunn, of the Living With Lakes Centre, argued for a new way of looking at waste. Rather than view it simply as a burden, “we need to step up and be the biotech centre of Canada,” he said.
Gunn said the mining industry uses “far too much energy,” and “everything you spend on energy comes out the tailpipe somewhere as pollution.”
He’d like to see more efficient energy use, as well as jobs created through remediating mining land and repurposing waste rock.
“There is an assay of about $2 billion in residual metals left in the Coniston slag piles,” he said. “There are many other billions of dollars left in the Copper Cliff pile, and hundreds of millions of dollars left in the problematic Long Lake tailings.”
Abandoned mine sites are typically considered liabilities, but “we can build a biotech industry in Sudbury with thousands of workers to simply clean up industrial waste.”
The same industry could “prevent waste in the first place from happening in the Ring of Fire,” he added.
For the rest of this article, click here: http://www.thesudburystar.com/2015/01/28/leaders-hope-to-inspire-new-visions-for-sudbury