The care we provide at UHN is a source of pride for our staff and critical to our patients' wellbeing. To ensure that we sustain our ability to care for patients and innovate in the years ahead we must find safer, simpler, and smarter ways to do our work. As you know, this has become more challenging in today's fiscally constrained environment so one of our goals in our Clinical Optimization area of focus is to conduct an operational review this year, across UHN.
In the past few months we have conducted a tendering process and have selected Ernst & Young's (EY) healthcare team to help us with this process. The work will be led by members of UHN's executive – Charlie Chan, Justine Jackson and Mike Nader, with the entire executive team and senior management involved throughout the engagement. Last week the team from EY met with our senior management team and meetings with leaders in the organization have now started.
The EY team has worked in a number of Ontario hospitals including Hamilton Health Sciences, St. Michael's Hospital and Sunnybrook. Several of the team members have spent many years working with the National Health Service in Britain. This experience with large research hospitals was critical to their selection as the firm to work with UHN.
Every day you see the increase in demand for our services and everyone here wants to be able to respond when we are needed. To do that we must examine everything we do and find ways to accomplish our mission and goals within the resources that are given to us. EY will use their experience to discover opportunities for us to make sustainable changes.
Many of you will have taken part in operational reviews in the past and know they are hard work and that change is challenging. EY's first step is to fully understand our work through a diagnostic phase which will involve many of you and require that we provide data and interview time. This phase will take us through August and September. They will be looking at the practices and processes we have in place and giving us an assessment as to what we will do to solve the problems we're facing today. Our work isn't static – what made sense ten, or even five, years ago may not make sense today. For us to be at the cutting edge of medicine and provide the best possible patient care it is our responsibility to look at the practices we have in place and ask, does the way we do business in all our areas still make sense? Our job is to do better – operational reviews are about continuing our journey to be the best.
My commitment is to keep everyone at UHN fully informed about our operational review. UHN's leaders will be involved throughout the process and my expectation is that they will also keep you informed of our progress and our plans.
Peter
