CHEPA remembers and mourns Cathy Fooks
Members of the Centre for Health Economics and Policy Analysis (CHEPA) were saddened to learn of the untimely death of Cathy Fooks, who helped CHEPA become an official entity in 1987. She served as one of its inaugural research coordinators before moving on to an exemplary 30-year career in health policy, inside and outside government. In the last few years, she has been one of Canada’s most influential advocates for the rights of patients and their family caregivers.
At the time of her death on Dec. 30, 2021, she was the patient ombudsman for Ontario, after serving for 13 years as the President and CEO of The Change Foundation.
Fooks became involved with CHEPA after meeting Greg Stoddart and Roberta Labelle. The pair were acting as consultants to a Select Committee of the Ontario Legislature on the Commercialization of Health and Social Services, while Fooks was a research officer in the Legislative Research Service at Queen’s Park and had been assigned to work with the committee. Fooks was subsequently recruited and hired by Jonathan Lomas as his research coordinator in health policy, and she helped the colleagues and centre co-founders make CHEPA a success.
Lomas says, “when I hired Cathy as our first health policy research coordinator, the centre was just getting underway. Our health policy programs were but a glimmer in our eye. It was Cathy’s energy and vision, along with her quietly commanding presence, that led to the successful launch of such activities as our annual health policy conferences, regular policy workshops and the policy commentary series. Cathy and I established a friendship back then that lasted thirty years. I will miss her a lot.”
Stoddart recalls Fooks as being “highly intelligent and motivated, lively and quick-witted, and fun to work with. She was an integral part of the initial success of CHEPA. Also, along with Roberta, she kept the more senior members of the centre grounded, on their toes and humble! It was apparent early on that she was destined to have an important and successful career, which of course she did.”
Fooks left CHEPA in 1991 to become policy advisor to the Minister of Health (Evelyn Gigantes) in the new Bob Rae NDP government.
She went on to serve as the executive director of the Health Council of Canada and to hold senior positions with the Canadian Policy Research Network, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario and the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (now IC/ES).
She is survived by her husband Terrence Sullivan, a faculty member at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, four children and two grandchildren.
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