Good Monday morning,
1. Highlights on UHN's Essentials
UHN's Essentials are essential to the work we do as a leading academic health sciences centre – hence the name!
Read here to learn more. Below, you'll find highlights on UHN's Essentials from last week.
People and Culture Importance of clinician-to-clinician coaching and medical director engagement: Last week, I was invited to attend the General Internal Medicine (GIM) division meeting and have a dialogue with our GIM colleagues. The conversation about our physician engagement scores was frank, open and productive – a tone we should expect at all UHN meetings. What I appreciated most was how ready and open all present were and respectful of diverse perspectives. Our key ingredients for improving clinician engagement will include strong leadership dyads between clinical directors and program medical directors. Most important is that our program leadership teams are meaningfully engaging with the full care team when it comes to making decisions about resources and changes that are necessary. Clinician-to-clinician communication and leadership coaching has been demonstrated to improve engagement!
People and Culture Nominations for UHN's Local Impact Awards are now open: Help recognize the contributions of those on TeamUHN by submitting a nomination here
[Editor's Note: Link is no longer available]. Winners will be announced on June 12 at UHN's Annual General Meeting (AGM), where we can look forward to loudly celebrating our collective achievements across care, research and education. This year, we are introducing the UHN Quality & Safety Impact Award. This award will recognize a member of TeamUHN who has significantly improved the safety culture or significantly reduced preventable patient harm in their area. Nominate a colleague or a team now until May 24.
Technology / Compassionate Care and Caring UHN wins award at Blockchain Revolution Global: Last week, UHN received the Enterprise Blockchain Transformation Award for our work to develop a proof of concept for a Patient Consent Gateway. We partnered with eHealth Ontario, IBM, patients, caregivers, researchers and beyond to develop a platform using blockchain technology that will enable patients to control the way consent is managed around their health data – from authorizing access to trusted health partners, monitoring who accesses it and providing consent for secondary use. Blockchain technology is speculated to change the world and UHN is exploring its vast potential. Many thanks to our Patient Partners as well as patient advisors from UHN and the community, UHN Digital, Techna and the Healthcare Human Factors teams for their support with this initiative.
2. What we discussed at our budget risk meetings
The provincial budget was tabled this month and I suspect many of you are wondering what this means for TeamUHN. While we know there is a 2.2% increase in the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care's budget – positive news – we are still waiting for the funding letters which indicate the specific amounts of money that will flow to UHN. Hard to determine what the budget means for us until then and we expect to receive the specific details in the next day or two. In the meantime, we held a series of budget risk meetings with clinical and non-clinical areas last week. UHN is aligned with the government in working towards a path of balance, so it's important we address our fiscal challenges and support all portfolios as they strive to deliver their work using allocated resources. Naturally, there is complexity in some areas so these conversations will continue. Ultimately, what we're striving for is a TeamUHN mentality and to deliver on our value of stewardship in a way that makes sense for our collective mission across care, research, education and quality of work life.
3. Congratulations to Ontario Health's new CEO Susan Fitzpatrick
As many of you know, Susan Fitzpatrick is CEO of the Toronto Central Local Health Integration Network (TC LHIN). Last week, she was announced as the interim CEO of Ontario Health. Excellent choice and great news for UHN, patients, providers and taxpayers! I've worked with Susan for a long time and she is respected for leading system transformation through Integrated Funding Models in Ontario – better linking quality, value and performance with greater accountability and transparency. We look forward to continuing our work with Susan and helping Ontario deliver a sustainable patient-centered health system for all.
Have a good week,
Kevin
