By Pam Wright
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Adam Topp sees a lot of similarities between Chatham-Kent and the Niagara Region where he was born.
That’s what attracted him to leading the Chatham-Kent Health Alliance as president and chief executive officer.
“They’re both agricultural and both rural,” Topp said in an interview just three days into his new role. “I grew up working on a peach farm so it’s nice to come back to a rural community. It does actually feel like coming home because the community very much feels like Grimsby felt when I grew up.”
An added bonus, he said, is that it brings the health-care veteran close to family in Ontario. Topp has four grown children, one of whom is attending post-secondary education in Toronto.
“The short story is I left when I was 18,” Topp said. “I worked across the country, in the U.S, overseas in the U.K. and Australia, and it was time to come back home to southern Ontario where I’m from.”
Topp, who is stepping into the spot following Lori Marshall’s retirement, brings a wealth of high-level health-care management experience to the job. After graduating from McMaster University with a Bachelor of Science and a MBA in health services management, he embarked on a career that’s taken him across the globe for 30 plus years.
He spent the last 15 years in Manitoba, serving as the president and CEO of the Shared Health-Soins Communs, the province’s provincial health authority. Prior to that he was director of health transformation for the Manitoba government’s Priorities and Planning Committee Secretariat.
In addition, Topp is a founding partner of Benchmark Intelligence Group (BIG Healthcare) – a management consulting service tailored for the health-care industry. He still owns the company but leaves the business of consulting to others.
His work with BIG and other consulting roles informs the CEO on the importance of health-care delivery in rural and underserviced areas, as well as funding challenges the system faces.
Streamlining services is key, he said.
“By nature, a single-payer system can be very efficient, so it’s part of our accountability and responsibility to address, live up to, and be accountable to the taxpayer by creating an efficient hospital,” Topp explained. “We can make a sustainable system by using resources as wisely as we can. That’s our obligation.”
Overseeing the redevelopment of the hospital’s Wallaceburg site, ensuring CKHA’s infrastructure and equipment is up to date and supporting staff are also on the agenda.
Topp points out that Ontario is a “guinea pig” of sorts as it is the only province that doesn’t have a provincial health-care authority in place and he wants to ensure different agencies work together.
“Here (Ontario) they are all separate, so how do we collaborate as best we can so that the patient flows through those systems without silos?” he asked. “So that’s Ontario’s unique challenge in Canada.”
Topp, who attended the recent CKHA Foundation’s Parade of Chefs fundraiser, was impressed with the $265,000 raised to buy equipment.
“That kind of thing is wonderful because we need that kind of support from the community in order to keep our capital structure in place,” he noted. “And so that was great to see and a great way to start.”
Going forward, Topp will be diving into numbers.
“I’ll be very interested in our capital plan and our capital redevelopment plan for Wallaceburg site and this (Chatham) site, but also to maintain our equipment because we don’t always get funded for that,” he said. “So, we’re relying on our foundation to do that.”
The way the Ministry of Health funnels dollars to hospitals is another leading issue, Topp said he will address.
“We need to have that conversation with Ontario Health and the ministry,” he added, noting the concern is not unique to Chatham-Kent.
Helping the CKHA recover from the lingering effects of the pandemic and the recent cyber-attack is another goal for Topp as he wants to ensure staff are supported after a few difficult years.
