Good Tuesday morning,
Sincerest thanks to everyone who worked in service of patients and families over the long weekend – and your families – so that so many other members of TeamUHN could spend time with loved ones.
Tomorrow is my one-year anniversary at UHN. I can't believe how fast it's gone! I'd like to take this opportunity to thank everyone for one of the greatest honours of my life – serving as CEO at this remarkable organization. Thank you for inspiring me, for keeping me informed of the issues and challenges, and for carrying forth our mission of exemplary care, research and education. Special thanks to our Board, Senior Management Team and our Patient Partners. I look forward to working with, and learning from, all of you, as a fellow member of TeamUHN, for many years to come. I hope you feel I've made some small contributions to continuing to improve this wonderful place.
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.
Partnerships UHN's Code Orange exercise now scheduled for Fall 2019 to align with TC LHIN's (Toronto Central Local Health Integration Network) exercise: I met Danielle Kane, a survivor of the Danforth shooting, at Toronto Rehab's Lyndhurst site last year. She is an incredible young woman. I'll never forget how sobering that experience was – or the shock our city went through as we suffered the loss of life and tragic injury due to mass casualties. Our hope is to never have to call a Code Orange in Toronto again, but I know many of you are wondering how you could help should the unthinkable occur. This is why getting every member of TeamUHN prepared is so important; e-Learning courses and mini team drills will be rolled out from now until June. Teamwork is essential in any disaster response, not only within UHN but also with community partners. UHN's Code Orange Improvement Steering Committee is working out what collaboration would look like with our community partners including Mount Sinai Hospital, SickKids, Sunnybrook, St. Michael's Hospital, Peel Regional Police and Toronto Police Services. If you have any questions you can reach out to Sam Sabbah and Janet Newton, co-leads of our Steering Committee.
Quality and Safety Celebrating recent unit-level safety records: Thank you to all those who work hard every day to make UHN a safer place for patients and TeamUHN. It's important we celebrate these accomplishments with collective pride.
See UHN's list of HAC (Hospital Acquired Conditions) Accomplishments here.
-
Toronto General Critical Care Units (MSICU, CICU, CVICU): 30 days without a central line infection across all three ICUs. Round of applause!
-
Princess Margaret Allogeneic Blood and Marrow Transplant Unit 14C: 112 days without a patient fall.
-
Toronto Rehab Bickle Centre Transitional Care Unit S4A: 100 days without a new pressure injury (unit best).
-
Toronto Rehab Bickle Centre Complex Continuing Care Unit S4B: 125 days without a new pressure injury (unit best).
Compassionate Care and Caring Another opportunity to acknowledge TeamUHN – providing excellent, compassionate care to a patient who suffered a stroke. I recently received a letter from Patient Relations which highlighted the following individuals: Toronto Western's Faydeen Allen, Jean Gray, Nazia Hossain, Amanda Leblanc, Vitor Mendes Pereira, Aleksandra Pikula, StacyAnn Williams, Calvin Yu and our paramedic colleagues. It was penned by a grateful family who wanted to express their gratitude for the "efficiency and gentleness" – professionalism balanced with humanity! – they experienced from these members of TeamUHN. The letter closes with "Your team displayed qualities and traits that cannot be taught in school but must be innate." The family acknowledges they were unable to get the names of everyone who helped, and would like to thank all involved. Allow me to join them with deepest and sincerest thanks.
2. Join us for a TeamUHN celebration – you're invited to our 2019 Report to our Community
Some of you know this event as our Annual General Meeting but we're now calling it UHN's Report to our Community. Everyone including our Patient Partners and Board of Trustees are invited to come celebrate our collective achievements across care, research and education. Please mark your calendars and join us!
-
Date: Wednesday, June 12, 2019
-
Time: 4:00 – 5:00 p.m.
-
Location: MaRS Auditorium
3. Spring long-service tea at UHN's Princess Margaret Cancer Centre
Last week, we had our Spring Long-service Tea at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, which is one of the world's top five cancer centres thanks to the dedication and talents of many long-serving members of TeamUHN. It was a sincere pleasure to hand out pins to members of TeamUHN for each 5-year milestone of service. Special shout-out to
Neil Amos, Radiation Safety for 50 remarkable years of service.
Congratulations and thank you! Only a very special person and and very special place sees service like Neil's.
4. What we discussed at our Executive Leadership Forum meeting
We had another
Executive Leadership Forum meeting this week – they are typically bi-weekly but we invited KPMG to present some internal audit findings. KPMG has been our internal auditor since 2016 and they've carefully reviewed the way we work, not just from a financial standpoint but across all areas. To help support our mission, they've provided a list of opportunities for improvement and these are the recurring themes:
-
Inconsistent operations across sites and departments: This audit highlighted the important of ensuring we have clear standards of excellence across UHN.
-
Expectations for our Health Information System (HIS): We know TeamUHN has been wanting a new HIS for a long time but we cannot plan for the future assuming that our HIS will magically solve all problems. Important we understand what our HIS is actually designed to do. As we move forward in this process we'll make sure this is clear.
-
Informal agreements or partnerships: The risk here is the lack of accountability when it comes to delivering on shared work. If a partner walks away, there's not much we can do without a formal agreement and this audit points out we can do a better job of this.
-
Contract management and vendor oversight: UHN is a big place and we engage with many, many vendors. We don't have a consistent way of managing these relationships or their contracts – which means it can be difficult to hold vendors accountable. If you're involved in contracting with vendors please ensure you work closely with our procurement team who can assist you with best practice.
These are all sound recommendations and no surprise to TeamUHN. So, with these themes in mind, our request is that you look at your departments and see if these opportunities apply to you. If so, please think about how we could tackle these issues and share them with your manager. Members of the Executive Leadership Forum will be reaching out to collaborate on solutions.
Have a good week – and thanks again. With your support and commitment, I'm ready to get started on Year 2!
Kevin
