Good Monday morning,
1. Highlights on UHN's Essentials
UHN's Essentials are the things essential to our work at UHN and represent our central responsibilities as a leading academic health sciences centre.
Read here to learn more. Below, you'll find highlights on UHN's Essentials from last week.
Quality and Safety Congratulations to Unit 3B at Toronto Western and Unit 6B at Toronto General for their new safety records: I believe in healthy competition when it comes to safety so it's great to hear that other units were inspired after reading about Toronto Rehab's record of 252 days with no pressure injuries. Marleine Elkhouri, manager of Toronto General's (TG) Unit 6B tells me her unit has since upped their target to 200 days – "If TR can do it so can we"). Unit 6B at TG has now reached 150 days with no pressure injuries and Unit 3B at Toronto Western reached 250 days. This is teamwork we can view with admiration!
Environments Severe weather conditions cause damage at Toronto Western and Princess Margaret: Last week, a Code Grey was called at Toronto Western due to an internal flood. Our day-surgery operating rooms (ORs) were significantly impacted but thanks to the swift work of many, many people, no ORs were cancelled due to the flood. Dozens of offices were also impacted though and I'm saddened to hear that irreplaceable mementos such as personal photos were damaged. I went over to see the flood's aftermath and extend my deepest sympathy to those affected. Princess Margaret also experienced a flood and although it wasn't as severe, they also had a frozen sewage line which closed toilets in the northwest area of the site. This caused considerable disruption to clinical areas for two days. Thanks to all members of TeamUHN who did a great job of containing these issues. These incidences show the vulnerable state of our aging buildings but also show how amazing our teams are at rallying in the face of these challenges.
Compassionate Care and Caring Hats off to the GoodHope Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome Clinic: We are fortunate to receive letters of appreciation from the people we're privileged to serve at UHN. One was brought to my attention about the team led by Hance Clarke so I'm sharing to illustrate the impact so many of you have on patients every day. "The team gave us more than just quality of life, they gave us hope and a revitalized confidence in the medical system; specifically the medical team at UHN." High praise and something for all of us to be proud of! The person expressed how supported they felt in their desire to gain enough mobility to make dinner for their family again – a goal they achieved thanks to the excellent and compassionate care they received.
People and Culture UHN'sLiving Our Values Awards winners: It was a pleasure to award the inaugural recipients of UHN's Living Our Value Awards last week. Congratulations to Brenda Perkins-Meingast for winning our Safety award, John Gajasan for winning Compassion, Leanne Casaubon for winning Teamwork, Heather Gordon for winning Integrity, and Vijiananthan Sivanandan for winning Stewardship.
More about our remarkable colleagues here.
People and Culture Welcome to our new Executive Director of Health and Social Policy: By now, some of you may have met Andrew Boozary who started this month as our new Executive Director of Health and Social Policy. You can listen to the Metro Morning interview about his new role here
[Editor's Note: Link is no longer available]. This is a co-appointment with our partners at the University of Toronto and a role we've restructured for in support of UHN's vision to deliver
A Healthier World. In this role, Andrew will be building partnerships and working across UHN with our programs and services to develop new models of healthcare delivery for patients with complex health and social needs. Andrew brings valued experience as a primary care physician and holds academic appointments as an assistant professor of policy innovation in the Department of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation at the University of Toronto and adjunct faculty member at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University.
2. Reading UHN's 2018 Research Report
Yesterday, I took some time to read our
annual Research Report available here. Take a look to get a sense of the world-class science we deliver across multiple disciplines at UHN – although you'd just be scratching the surface – and the total funding we received for fiscal 2018. Congratulations to our researchers, research staff and trainees for securing such highly competitive grants!
3. Reflecting on safety and quality at Breakfast with the Chiefs
Last week, I spoke at Breakfast With the Chiefs and I want to thank all of the members of TeamUHN who attended and Andrew Boozary and Ingrid Yu for putting together the supporting material for the talk. This weekly update also gives me the opportunity to apologize for an error I made in the talk and to thank a couple of people in the audience for having the good sense to step forward and gently correct me. One of the UHN examples I used was our new Nursing Documentation Form, with credit given to Joe Cafazzo and his team. In doing that I did not recognize Brenda Perkins-Meingast – the same Brenda who received UHN's Living Our Values award for Safety, as noted above – and the team in Collaborative Academic Practice. Brenda and team certainly did the heavy lifting in working throughout UHN to collect all the material currently in use, convince various people that a standard form for nursing would be of great assistance in documentation, and then to ask Healthcare Human Factors for help with the finished product. So, my thanks to Brenda and everyone who worked with her and to those who stepped forward to correct my error.
For anyone who wants to see the talk, you can find it here.
Have a good week,
Kevin
