Profile of the Month
Alumni Profiles
Alumni of the Department of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation (HPME) are involved in a broad range of leadership activities across the health care sector. To promote greater awareness of the many accomplishments and innovations of this diverse group, we are pleased to include alumni profiles as a regular feature of the Society of Graduates newsletter. This issue features Mr. Tony Dagnone , President and CEO of the London Health Sciences Centre, Chair of the Ontario Hospital Association and graduate of the University of Toronto Hospital Administration program.
Tony Dagnone - Health Care is a Team Sport
“Health
care is a team sport,” says Tony Dagnone, and he should know. As well as being
a highly effective Hospital CEO for over 25 years, he has been very active
in his community, including helping to host the Brier and chairing the 1989
Canada Summer Games, when Saskatoon hosted 3,000 high performance young athletes.
Tony's personal values of integrity, hard work and respect underlie his approach to administration. A fundamental task of administration, he believes, is to build working relationships over time (“it's a marathon, not a sprint”) and he pays particular attention to fostering collaboration among hospital, community and government (at both the provincial and the federal levels). Consistently hiring managers who are team players, he stresses the long-term benefits of building good working relationships both within the organization and outside it.
CEO of Saskatoon's Royal University Hospital from 1977 till 1992, Tony took pride in instituting Canada's first hospital foundation, for the local community to fund hospital items not funded by government. Saskatchewan's NDP government of the day, the founders of Medicare, took great exception to this idea initially and roundly criticized it in the provincial legislature. With time, however, the government relented and the Saskatoon hospital foundation became a model for many more to follow, till today.
Arriving in London , Ontario as CEO of University Hospital , Dagnone was glad to find many similarities there to the city he had left behind. London, though a bit bigger than Saskatoon, still felt small and the hospital's location on a university campus was familiar to him. In less than three years Tony became CEO of London Health Sciences Centre, the merged entity combining three hospitals. Currently he is leading LHSC in consolidating its three sites into two, as well as rejuvenating some facilities and completing new building.
Dagnone's family origins are in the Campo Basso region of Italy, between Rome and Naples, from where, in the depressed economic times of the late nineteenth century, his grandfather left his subsistence farm, all alone, and came to Canada to work for the CPR. From Saskatchewan grandfather Dagnone soon informed his family that their future was here. Tony arrived at age nine without a word of English, and was placed in grade one where bullies were only too ready to make fun of a newcomer; he addressed these challenging situations in typically straightforward, Tony fashion: “like everything else, you got over it – you stood up for your rights”.
Flash forward some years - as a new B.Comm., Tony was eager to get into the big world of business, but a research assistant job for his health care professor, and the advent of universal Medicare changed his path and led him instead into hospital administration. He completed the University of Toronto certificate in hospital administration before returning to Saskatchewan . He continues to have a soft spot for Toronto and for the university and maintains a connection with the H.P.M.E. Department.
From his student days, when he wrote his thesis on hospital mergers, Tony has been concerned to foster more collaboration and less duplication in our health care system. He is especially proud of the strong working relationships developed among the London hospitals and with the local community; London , he says, is a 'poster' community for voluntary (i.e., not government-imposed) collaboration in health care. As a result of this exemplary collaboration, comprehensive health care programs exist that allow 96% of all patients in southwestern Ontario to be cared for in their own region., with the other 4% being those patients who require very highly specialized, esoteric kinds of care. Tony is Chair of the Ontario Hospital Association.
Tony has broad experience in governmental relations; asked for advice on how to work successfully with the Ministry, he counsels to establish one's credibility, be consistent, present evidence to back up your case and document needs. Above all, he hearkens back to the need to build a team relationship, with the Ministry included on the team.
Tony is devoted to his family (two daughters have very active careers in business, with the third completing an Ivey MBA) and continues to be very involved with his community, including sitting regularly as a Citizenship Court judge. Many honours have been bestowed on Tony, most notably the Order of Canada (1992) and the Queen's Jubilee Medal (2003). A leader who is deeply involved in his community, Tony really is a team player.