Dear Colleagues,
A few weeks ago, our Senior Management Team held a retreat to discuss the strategic directions that UHN will follow in the fiscal year that begins in April 2007. I thought it was important to give you a sense of these directions and the evolution of the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) that we are using to measure the success of our strategy. To start, here are the four critical success factors that will define UHN strategy in 2007/08:
| • | We know that there is still a lot of work to do on the clinical operational initiatives that were started this year: ED-GIM, the OR Transformation, Palliative Care, the I³ initiative in the Peter Munk Cardiac Centre and Image-Guided Surgery (GTx) projects. One critical success factor for next year is that we will keep our promise to improve the quality and efficiency of care provided at UHN by seeing these initiatives through to completion. We are very aware of the amount of work required to complete these projects, as well as providing all patients with safe and patient centered care. We therefore do not plan on any new clinical initiatives in the next year. |
| • | UHN can only achieve its potential if we do have the best people in place throughout the organization. So another critical success factor is to ensure that we recruit and retain the right people as well as providing leadership development opportunities. The Nursing Resource Team and the Manager Succession Project are examples of initiatives that have been developed to accomplish this strategy. |
| • | In the next year, we also want to leverage UHN's assets and abilities in the system evolution to the Local Health Integration Networks (LHINs). I think that that we are all proud that UHN staff are often called upon to participate in and lead system-wide change. Your Senior Management Team agrees that we should continue to assist the provincial Ministry as well as the new Central Toronto LHIN in their efforts to make a more integrated health care system for our patients and their families. |
| • | We want to maximize UHN's potential in basic, translational, and clinical research and enhance opportunity for innovation and research commercialization. We believe that research and teaching are the defining characteristics of UHN. We need to continue to develop state of the art facilities for research and also to develop more sustainable research funding. |
The senior team also reviewed the 2006/07 BSC, evaluating the outcomes that we want to improve, the validity of the data we could collect and asking whether each line in the scorecard measured something that is meaningful. Senior Management started to revise the scorecard for 2007/08 and this initial draft has now been circulated to all senior directors in the organization. We will be working together to finalize a revised version in the next couple of months
I believe that our first BSC has been a success and helped us focus our efforts and measure whether we are succeeding in improving the organization. It is a document that will continue to be refined as we work with everyone at UHN to make it meaningful and relevant to the work that you do. If you haven't yet made yourself familiar with the BSC, check out the intranet site behind the button "Strategy and Scorecard", which has all of the material about this year's BSC, including our latest results from April-September 2006.
Bob
