Teri Nicholas, President and CEO, B.C. Children’s Hospital Foundation

Teri Nicholas, CEO, B.C. Children’s Hospital Foundation | BCBusiness
As president and CEO of B.C. Children’s Hospital Foundation, it’s Teri Nicholas’ job to keep money rolling in to help build a new hospital.

Teri Nicholas fondly remembers the former Grace Maternity Hospital, and is dedicated to building a world-leading children’s hospital in Vancouver.

Teri Nicholas has two kids and two grandkids. It was thinking of them that ultimately fuelled her decision to quit her long-time gig heading Family Services of Greater Vancouver to sit in another big chair, as president and CEO of the B.C. Children’s Hospital Foundation.

“I was never going to leave family services. I was going to retire there,” says the friendly brunette, who has the olive skin tone of her Italian ancestors and favours red lipstick and power suits. As the hospital foundation’s CEO, her world is a juggle of business, charity, policy, advocacy and social services. Her main role is ensuring money keeps rolling into the foundation and through to the province’s only full-service, pediatric acute-care hospital, which, via its remote care centres, serves children as far north as the Yukon.

“It’s an incredible place here,” she enthuses. “The stories and strength of the children and families who come here are amazing.”

Nicholas’s daughter was born on this site in 1988, in what was then Salvation Army Grace  Hospital. (In 1994 Grace would merge with Shaughnessy General Hospital’s Women’s Health Centre to become B.C. Women’s Hospital and Health Centre.) The doctors were great, she recalls, and when her son got seriously ill with E. coli, he was treated here. (It was an emotional ordeal; Nicholas’s own brother had died of a flu-like illness with similar symptoms some years before, in her native Wisconsin.) To this day, Nicholas credits the doctors at Children’s with saving her son’s life. She says it completes the circle to return to the hospital in a leadership role.

Snapping out of her sentimental recollection, she addresses the hospital’s most pressing needs today. “We’re really overcrowded,” she tells me, her heels clicking on the hard hospital floor as we round another hallway on a walk around the big Oak Street campus. We pass a trauma bay and a series of observation rooms surrounded by the croons and cries of babies and toddlers. “When this hospital was built in 1982, we expected about 35,000 patient visits a year. Last year we had 212,000, six times the amount this hospital was built for.”

We swing outside through Emergency and walk into the warm sun and fast wind of a spring afternoon in Vancouver. She stops our stroll outside an old four-storey building with crumbling windowsills.

“Our intention is to take this building down,” Nicholas says calmly, as if describing a minor domestic chore, even though each glimpse at this repurposed 1930s veteran’s hospital is a reminder of the task at hand: find $150 million to help pay for its demolition and replacement with a major new acute-care and diagnostic services hospital.

The push is part of a larger $200-million capital plan launched in 2008, shelved after the global financial crunch froze the charity landscape the following year, then resuscitated in 2010. Nicholas has $60 million left to raise by the end of 2013 if construction is to stay on schedule. Though, in a way, it has already begun. As we speak, workers are mocking up the new hospital, floor by floor, via life-sized cardboard models in a 150,000-square-foot warehouse in Burnaby; doctors and administrators later test their function through walkthroughs and simulated scenarios.

The pressure is on, and competition for donations is tough. “There’s a lot of charities out there and a lot of great causes,” she acknowledges. “Our challenge is to make sure we can clearly communicate the needs of the hospital.” But while the environment could be more favourable for a major charity drive, ultimately Nicholas isn’t worried. “I think we’re in excellent shape going forward. Hopefully things don’t shake up out there in the economic world.”

Pediatric care is expensive, she continues, because different hardware and equipment are needed to accommodate the spectrum of patients, from five-pound babies to 250-pound teenagers. Some of today’s modern machines are too large to be manoeuvered into and across the hospital’s narrow hallways. (In one particularly desperate solution, construction crews had to build an extension on an existing building to house a new MRI machine.)

Nicholas also wants to find a new way of delivering care, one with families in mind. Research suggests kids get well faster and go home sooner if their parents stay close during treatment. While there’s very little family privacy in intensive care today – think multiple beds per crowded room – she wants the new hospital to have plenty of individual patient rooms with private bathrooms and additional space for families.

Finally, she needs money to make sure the research and teaching arms of the hospital deliver on their promises: a number of recent specialist recruits only agreed to come work at the hospital on assurances of a new facility coming online.

“It’s about better health for children, but it’s also about research,” Nicholas says. “Because we’ve been so successful with research, children who didn’t make it in the past are living well into adulthood now. We’re not only saving lives today; we’re saving lives for future generations as the research continues to find more solutions to medical problems.”