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.

Quality and Safety Keeping wait times low despite a high volume of patients: Let's give a round of applause to the blood collection lab team at our Princess Margaret site for serving more than 600 patients one day (with one staff member short!) while keeping wait times below 20 minutes. Special thanks to Guitree Sukhdeo, Senior Technician at UHN's Laboratory Medicine Program, who played an important role in making this happen – she emphasizes that this was made possible thanks to the whole blood collection team. Many thanks to all involved. This team truly lived "the needs of patients come first".

People and Culture Tell us what UHN Directors, Vice Presidents and Physican Leaders could be doing to help you feel heard: I was very taken by the results of the Staff and Physician engagement surveys which highlighted the need for improved dialogue and input about major decisions. As a result, we just launched a new tool called Thoughtexchange, where you can share your top ideas for improvement anonymously. Another great example of using technology and user-friendly platforms to support TeamUHN. With the help of our colleagues in Human Resources, we are hosting UHN's first Thoughtexchange session over the next two weeks to crowdsource your ideas and I look forward to seeing the results. Please share your ideas and vote on the ones you'd like us to bring to life.

2. What we discussed at our Executive Leadership Forum meeting

Here is what we discussed at last week's meeting (see who attends these meetings on this Intranet page – and note this forum now includes UHN's Site Vice Presidents):

  • Accreditation (Mike Nader; Executive Vice President, Clinical Support & Performance): Reviewed the presentation we will be doing this September for our Accreditation colleagues. As you may know, Accreditation Canada is visiting select sites at UHN from Sept. 16 - 20. External assessment, such as the one done by Accreditation Canada, helps ensure we're meeting all standards required of a high-performing hospital. This visit will focus on Toronto Rehab and Princess Margret sites.
  • Finance Update (Darlene Dasent, Chief Financial Officer): Reviewed Q1 results and provided an update on how we are doing compared to peers in Canadian healthcare. Unfortunately we've had a very challenging first quarter and are tracking a significant deficit so we're all going back to look at opportunities for further savings ASAP. If you have ideas please share them!
  • UHN Digital FY 2019/20 Roadmap Update (David Wiljer; Executive Director, Education, Technology & Innovation): The Q1 update highlighted the scope and importance of the large-scale technology changes underway, including preparation for our Health Information System and the transition of UHN's help desk and support systems to our in-house teams. Given the importance of these areas, UHN Digital will be working with our Senior Management Forum to determine how we'll prioritize all other technology projects and ensure success for TeamUHN.
  • Space Management Proposal (Ron Swail, Vice President, Facilities Management – Planning, Redevelopment & Operations and Ian McDermott; Senior Director, Planning & Integration): Provided an update on UHN's improved project approval process. Projects that meet the following criteria must be brought to the Executive Leadership Forum (ELF) before any work or planning starts: major space transformation or operational change, public/patient impact, or significant cost. We also talked about space and how we should be using this valuable asset support all of UHN. ELF approved a space management program and creation of a space management committee to review significant space changes. The terms of reference, membership and criteria of this committee are in the process of being finalized.

3. Six Guiding Principles for UHN's Health Information System

Last week, UHN's HIS Executive Steering Committee established the guiding principles for the implementation of our Health Information System (HIS). These principles will ground all the decisions we make as we move forward. Very important to have input from our clinical colleagues amongst many others, so sincere thanks to the HIS clinical working group and the Executive Steering Committee for their input.

1. Support UHN patient safety, quality of care and outcomes assessment initiatives.

2. Promote the seamless flow of information and safe transitions of care between health care providers in the circle of care, UHN patients, clients and caregivers.

3. Be the primary source of health information for all UHN patients, clients and caregivers.

4. Further enhance the work experience and well-being of TeamUHN by integrating care, research and education.

5. Enable high reliability workflows based on UHN appropriate use guidelines.

6. Incorporate vendor product functionality that aligns with UHN’s scope for this project.

If you have any questions about what these principles will look like in action or how they were developed, please message our HIS Renewal Team at HISRenewal@uhn.ca.

Have a good week,

Kevin

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