In the coming weeks, we will be receiving the results of our Speak Up for Safety survey completed last fall. These results will help us in a number of different ways. First, we will be able to benchmark our safety culture against hundreds of organizations across North America. This will give us the type of perspective that we always seek as we aspire to be a world-leading organization and will help us to frame our safety transformation in the context of where we stand on a North American scale. We will also be able to match up our safety survey results with our Employee Engagement survey results to be able to learn lessons from high-performing units and use principles of a learning health organization to extrapolate lessons from high performing units to the rest of the organization.
Last week, I was around the organization again visiting a number of front line clinical areas and chatting with researchers. I visited the Toronto Western ED, the Look Good Feel Better Centre at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, and nursing units 17A and 17B at PM. I had lunch with the staff on 17A and B and we had a number of great conversations about our safety transformation along with superb discussion around current issues facing the health care system. I also connected over a meal with a number of our researchers to learn more about the programs in our research institutes and to chat about the future directions of UHN research efforts. This week, I will be back in conversations with the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care working on behalf of our patients and staff and I shall be with Prime Minister Trudeau as we make a special announcement this week related to an academic-industry-government partnership here in Toronto.
We have received a number of excellent ideas on the operational plan that we communicated last week to address our budget challenges. As we continue our work to put these changes into effect in the coming weeks, I want to thank all of you for the incredible commitment to work together to meet these challenges ahead. Key elements of our strength as an organization are trust, commitment to our values, and teamwork. Working together means a renewed commitment to putting the needs of our patients first – a value that is hard wired into all of us at UHN.
Peter
