THUNDER BAY — After the 12 years Janet DeMille has spent at the helm of Thunder Bay District Health Unit, the COVID-19 pandemic is certainly something she won't soon forget.
“That was extraordinary and certainly not something that I had ever anticipated when I started this job,” she said. “It’s always one of those hypothetical things that could happen. That was really quite something and it was very challenging.”
On Thursday, DeMille, the medical officer of health with the health unit, announced she will be resigning from her post at the end of this year.
It just felt like the right time to step away, she told Newswatch on Friday.
“I've been here for a while and then at the leadership role and we've gone through some really difficult times,” said DeMille. “That had an impact on me but we've done a lot of work since then and it seems like the right time to potentially pass it over to somebody else.”
Before starting at the health unit, DeMille worked as a family physician in Thunder Bay and the region for 10 years.
She first took on the role of associate medical officer of health in 2012 before progressing to medical officer of health and chief executive officer.
DeMille highlighted working with the health unit’s board on public health issues as well as strengthening programming to “better meet the needs of communities.”
The health unit also had to catch up on programming that had been pushed to the side during the height of the pandemic, she said.
“(The pandemic) was a lot of uncertainty and yet you try to give people the right messages within that context of uncertainty and not necessarily being able to predict where things are going to go,” said DeMille. “You can see that there was a lot of curveballs in the pandemic that we had to sort of navigate. It was definitely hard to sort of absorb all of that information, try to put it out in a meaningful way for people to help understand what's happening.”
She noted the enormous amount of work for health unit staff during the pandemic and the toll that it took on them.
And it’s the staff DeMille said she will miss the most when she says goodbye to the health unit in December.
“It's about the people and the staff that I have been privileged to work with for these many, many years. I think that's what I will miss the most,” she said. “And I think there's a lot of public health that's very meaningful and almost fun. It's stuff that I really liked to dig into and to be challenged by, and so I think I'm going to be thinking of some of those things as well.”
What the future holds for DeMille is still up in the air, with the doctor saying she has many options running through her mind at this time.
“Some of it’s actually personal sort of opportunities as well,” she said. “I’d like to stay and do some public health work but not quite at the magnitude that I have been doing.”
The board of health will begin the process to recruit a new medical officer of health this spring.
