​Dear Colleagues,

The Excellent Care for All Act (EDFAA), which came into effect last June, requires all Ontario hospitals to create annual Quality Improvement Plans (QIPs) and make them available to the public. 

These plans require hospitals to set targets related to the safety, effectiveness, access and patient-centredness of the care it provides. The legislation also requires hospitals to establish quality committees, implement patient and care provider satisfaction surveys, develop a declaration of values and establish a patient relations process to address and improve the patient experience.

The great news is that here at UHN we are already doing many, if not all, of these things in some format and we already track many of these indicators on our Balanced ScoreCard.

  • Our Quality Committee of the Board has been in existence for over 12 years and continues to present to our Board of Directors at every meeting. As you know, we also conduct patient and staff satisfaction surveys regularly to ensure that we're kept abreast of our patient and staff concerns.
  • Our values – Caring, Excellence, Teamwork, Innovation, Integrity, Leadership and Respect – are deeply rooted in our UHN culture and reflect our vision of achieving global impact.
  • Our Patient Relations Department continues to set the bar for addressing patient concerns and praise and serves as a positive example for other hospitals to improve the patient experience by including them as partners in care.


Within our QIP we have outlined our aims and measures for the next year. These include initiatives such as continuing to improve our hand hygiene compliance rates. As you know, our Infection Prevention & Control Department has been successfully leading our hand hygiene campaign and we continue to see increasing results thanks to each and every one of your efforts.

We will also aim to continue to reduce our emergency department (ED) wait times by ensuring expedient flow of admitted patient from the ED to inpatient beds. Our ED has been working hard to triage patients as safely and quickly as possible and will continue to review their processes.

We will be focusing on many other initiatives in addition to improving our hand hygiene compliance and ED wait times. To learn more, check out our QIP and supporting documents which are available on our public website at www.uhn.ca/corporate/AboutUHN/Quality_Patient_Safety/Pages/quality_improvement_plan.aspx.

Please take the time to review and don't hesitate to drop me a line if you have any questions.

Bob

Quicklinks
Back to Top