Our Patients

This year, our goals focused on three major themes: patient safety, improved access to our programs and health care system leadership. We made great strides in all three areas and plan on continued improvements in the upcoming year through our focused initiatives.

UHN enhanced our patient safety practices across the organization. We were a beta-testing site for a Surgical Safety Checklist in the Operating Room (OR) initiative, making a global contribution to patient welfare through this World Health Organization-sponsored pilot. The study found that the Checklist improves communication among team members and increases consistency in the use of evidence-based standards of surgical care. We now use the Checklist across all three of our hospitals.

For the second year in a row, UHN posted one of the lowest hospital standardized mortality ratios in the country. We were one of the first Canadian hospitals to publicly post our rates for common hospital-acquired infections—Clostridium difficile (C. difficile), methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and vancomycin resistant Enterococcus. UHN has also played a leadership role in efforts to disseminate this level of transparency across Ontario. This work has resulted in public reporting of these infection rates for all Ontario hospitals and the creation of a new provincial reporting website (www.ontario.ca/patientsafety). In the coming year, we will be reporting rates for Central Line Infection (CLI), Ventilator-Associated Pneumonia (VAP), Surgical Site Infection Prevention and Hand Hygiene Compliance.

Our ORs saw the completion of the OR Transformation Project, begun in 2006. The project engaged inter-professional teams across UHN, and focused on improving patient care and access to care through new clinical care models, treatment innovations and work-flow processes, as well as team renewal and engagement initiatives. We have successfully reduced wait times in our pre-admission clinics by over two hours; we have also reduced time between cases, increasing our capacity to care for patients requiring emergency procedures. Our Central Processing Department, which provides sterile instruments and supplies for all our ORs, improved efficiency by establishing new standards and staffing practices.
Our Emergency Department (ED) – General Internal Medicine Transformation Project shifted its focus towards improving the care of Alternate Level of Care patients. Our efforts to improve the continuum of care for our patients are in alignment with a province-wide strategy that aims to create partnerships and programs to reduce waits in Ontario's emergency departments. For example, UHN has piloted a highly successful nurse-led mobile outreach team in conjunction with several long-term care homes (LTCH) in west Toronto. The objective of the program is to decrease unnecessary hospital transfers from LTCHs to our ED. A team of UHN nurses provides care directly to the patient in a LTCH setting and when necessary, the team facilitates booking of investigations, procedures and appointments, thus averting admissions to hospital.

Learn more:

Infection Control at UHN

From the news archives:

World first expands lung donor organ pool
Surgical Safety checklist reduces mortality and complications
Nursing beyond UHN's walls, all the way to James Bay
PCC facilitators bring staff into the equation
Living Donor Appreciation Night
Heart Transplant Program celebrates milestone
UHN Palliative Care partners to develop hospice
Patient celebrates 40th anniversary of kidney transplant
OR Transformation project wraps up:
Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4