Good Monday morning,
1. Highlights on UHN's Essentials
UHN's Essentials are just that – essential to the work we do at UHN! They 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 How we're addressing our MDRD (Medical Device Reprocessing Department) issues across sites: Thank you everyone for your patience and diligence while our teams work on solutions to these very complex problems. Permit me to highlight some advancements
since my last update:
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Situational awareness: Contributing causes are multifaceted and include old equipment malfunctioning, gaps with preventative maintenance, workflow and process issues, infrastructure issues, and poor location of the department (specifically at Toronto Western/TW's MDRD). There is no "silver bullet" or quick fix for these challenges.
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Janet Newton taking on MDRD for all sites (TW, Toronto General, Toronto Rehab's Bickle Centre): Many of our MDRD issues are occurring at TW so Janet Newton (Vice President, Site Lead of TW) – who sees and lives through these challenges with her teams – is now in charge of leading our MDRD work across our sites. This is also part of our effort to flatten the organization. AnnMarie Tyson in her role as Director, MDRD will report to Jan. Together, they will collaborate with many other teams.
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Our sincerest thanks to Emily Musing (Vice President, Quality and Safety) for her former MDRD leadership, she will be replacing one monumental task with another: our upcoming Accreditation work. Stay tuned for more from Emily and Mike Nader (Executive Vice President, Clinical Support and Performance).
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Improved visibility and safety huddles: Starting Feb. 7, twice-weekly safety huddles were initiated with MDRD leadership, the Office of Stewardship & Sustainability, Lean Coaches and colleagues from the OR. They are recording their progress in a shared tracker, so we can expect regular updates as they work to deliver sustained improvement supported by our colleagues in FM-PRO (Facilities Management – Planning, Redevelopment & Operations).
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Finally, thank you to our valued colleagues in MDRD for their resilience as they work through many new changes.
Partnerships TAHSN (Toronto Academic Health Science Network) CEOs committing to tackling system issues together: We know it's important to work as effectively as we can across UHN, but it is equally important we work effectively with other service providers including community-based partners and other peer hospitals. Last week, I met with some colleagues from TAHSN and we will be joining forces to tackle clinician wellness and to seize opportunities around artificial intelligence, machine learning and Big Data. More on that later.
2. What we discuss at our Executive Leadership Forum meetings
In the spirit of transparency, I'd like to start highlighting what we talk about at our bi-weekly Executive Leadership Forum (ELF) meetings.
With our ELF structure, decision making and accountability are closer to the frontline and patients. Important choices are now in the hands of various committees run by wise and thoughtful members of TeamUHN. ELF is tasked with supporting committees when they are unable to reach consensus or listening attentively if there is something critical on the horizon. Last week, we discussed three items:
- UHN's Safety Scorecard for Quality Improvement,
- Our Enterprise Data Committee, and
- Next steps for rolling out our Strategic Plan. As mentioned, our programs and departments are responsible for looking at their work and goals and figuring out how they align with our plan – and thinking about things they could stop that don't support the plan. To help encourage diversity in thinking and support alignment, we are creating an advisory committee comprised of up-and-coming UHN leaders. Together, they will meet with our programs and departments once a quarter and provide feedback and suggestions. Sadly, because of our size, we can only involve a small number of next generation leaders but we will be creating more opportunities for all to engage. Very important for next generation leaders to be given opportunities to develop and advance their careers at UHN! Stay tuned for more details.
3. Always a pleasure to meet frontline staff
With colleagues from Unit 4B Fell at Toronto Western. Thank you to Unit Manager Alan Doyle for the invitation – and Jennifer Pittman for taking the photo!
As I've mentioned, I drop by our Emergency Departments and individual units whenever I can. Important and valuable opportunity to connect with members of TeamUHN who are closest to patients and families. Unit 4B Fell at Toronto Western were kind enough to invite me over and it was truly the highlight of my week. Thank you to everyone on 4B for taking time out of your busy days to tell me about your work and what you hope to achieve at UHN. I encourage all units to invite members of senior management to come observe and help with solutions. In the meantime, I await my next invitation!
Have a good week,
Kevin
