http://www.canada.com/edmonton/edmontonjournal/story.asp?id=4DE908F8-E30E-49EF-ABC9-C0FC6607EC43 Susan Ruttan
The Edmonton Journal
Saturday, October 11, 2003
EDMONTON - As someone whose parents both suffered from gastrointestinal problems, Midge Zeidler knows the miseries such diseases can cause. That helped spur the local philanthropist to give a $2-million donation to build Canada's first stand-alone centre dedicated to gastroenterology patient care and research.
The centre will bring together in one building all the University Hospital specialists and nurses who work in gastroenterology. The new three-storey, 30,000-square-foot building will be next to the hospital on 112th Street and 86th Avenue.
"There are a lot of people who have problems with their stomachs or liver," Zeidler said in an interview Friday. "It's just not a high-profile problem."
Besides her parents' problems, Zeidler said she's known friends, and children of friends, who struggle with such things as ulcers or Crohn's disease.
The Zeidler family is one of Edmonton's most prominent and most generous families.
Midge Zeidler's mother, Margaret, who died in 1997, made major donations to the Citadel Theatre, the Edmonton Space and Science Centre (now the Odyssium), and the Winspear Centre as well as the University Hospital Foundation.
Zeidler said her two daughters, who don't live in Edmonton, have been fully involved in the donation decision, so the money comes from the family.
Dr. Vincent Bain, a liver specialist in the U of A gastroenterology division, said pulling all the U of A gastroenterologists together in one building will have a powerful effect, allowing collaboration that can't happen today.
"We feel like the Oilers when they got the Coliseum, because now we've got a place where we can really play, and hopefully excel," he said.
The University Hospital already runs Canada's largest gastrointestinal clinical trials centre, which will move into the new building. Other research projects will also take place there.
In the basement, said Bain, there will be an infusion centre where patients with diseases such as Crohn's can get their medications by intravenous infusion.
He added news that the special centre will be built has already helped recruit three new specialists to the city.
The centre will also make a difference to those afflicted with diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease or colitis, he said.
"A lot of suffering goes on from these things."
Such donations play an important part in retaining top medical staff, said Myrna Fyfe, president of the University Hospital Foundation. The $2-million donation is one of the top three gifts the foundation has received, she said.
The centre, to be called the Zeidler Family Gastrointestinal Health and Research Centre, has been in the works for six years, driven primarily by Dr. Richard Fedorak, head of gastroenterology at the U of A Hospital.
The total cost is expected to be around $3 million.
Ceremonial sod-turning for the new centre will take place Tuesday, with construction to follow later this year. The building is expected to take at least a year to complete.
The Zeidlers ran a forest products company for 65 years, selling it in 1999.