Ontario Health Minister Eric Hoskins thanks Loretta Rogers Thursday during the announcement of a $130-million donation to establish the Ted Rogers Centre for Heart Research in Toronto.Chris Young/The Globe and Mail
In the last years of his life, the legendary cable magnate Ted Rogers travelled to Germany, Switzerland and the United States in search of cutting-edge treatments that would keep his frail heart ticking a little longer.
"We gave it our best shot, both of us," said Bernard Gosevitz, the doctor who treated Mr. Rogers until he died of congestive heart failure in December, 2008, at the age of 75. "When [Mr. Rogers] was dying, his minister asked me … 'how would you describe your care of Ted?' I said, 'Ted and Bernie's incredible adventure.' And it was. It really was."
Dr. Gosevitz was on hand Thursday as Mr. Rogers's widow, Loretta, announced that her husband's quest for improvements in cardiac care would be revived with a landmark $130-million donation to establish the Ted Rogers Centre for Heart Research.
The Rogers family's gift – the largest ever to a Canadian health-care initiative – is aimed at cutting in half the number of hospitalizations for heart failure in Canada over the next decade. The money will fund a slew of research and patient care projects, focusing on everything from childhood cardiac genomics to new technologies to monitor cardiac symptoms from home.
The Hospital for Sick Children, the University Health Network and the University of Toronto, the three institutions that will house the centre, will roughly match the donation for a total of $269-million over 10 years.
Thirty-three scientists and clinicians at the three locations have already been seconded to the project, and an international search for the centre's permanent director will now begin in earnest.
"I'm not aware that there is an equivalent centre in the world to this, where you have such a well-defined and amazingly well-resourced collaboration between a university and two hospitals that deal with the full spectrum of a patient's life," said Barry Rubin, the medical director of the Peter Munk Cardiac Centre and UHN's representative on the team that worked behind the scenes for nearly three years to secure the donation and create the centre.
"So I anticipate that as the centre matures, people from around the world that develop heart problems, their doctors will say to them, 'You need to go to the Ted Rogers Centre for Heart Research.'"
Edward Rogers, one of Mr. Rogers's four children and the deputy chairman of Rogers Communications Inc., said the family members knew shortly after the patriarch's death that they wanted to make a major philanthropic gesture in his honour.
The family began speaking with UHN, SickKids and U of T nearly three years ago, Edward Rogers said. Eventually, "We said, 'why don't we just have them come back with one idea?' … that's when we really started to get some traction," he said.
About a year ago, the family turned the fledgling plan for a heart research centre over to Alan Horn, the chairman of Rogers, and his team to hammer out the philanthropic equivalent of a business plan.
(The donation, however, is not from the company. It is from the private fortune of the Rogers family, which, with a net worth of nearly $7.6-billion, is Canada's fourth wealthiest.)
The family had hoped to unveil the donation on the fifth anniversary of Mr. Rogers's death last Dec. 2, but nailing down the details of the complicated collaboration took nearly a year longer than planned.
The delay gave the parties time to name an interim director and eight research chairs.
Edward Rogers said his father would have been "absolutely thrilled" at Thursday's announcement. Dr. Gosevitz called the centre a fitting tribute to Mr. Rogers's grit in the face of decades of heart problems.
"He taught me, as a physician, the meaning of bravery, the meaning of hope and the meaning of optimism – which this gift brings."