MESSAGE FROM:
Barbara Collins, President & CEO Humber River Health
Michael Iacovelli, Board Chair, Humber River Health
Sandra Sualim, President & CEO Humber River Health Foundation
Nick Simone, Board Chair, Humber River Health Foundation
It has been a monumental year for our organizations. For the first time in two years, we were able to see beyond the intensity of the COVID-19 pandemic and orient ourselves towards the future with renewed clarity and purpose. The launch of our 2023 – 2026 Strategic Plans also led to the ideation and recent introduction of our new names: Humber River Health and the Humber River Health Foundation. Renaming our organizations is representative of the exciting growth and expansion that we embraced in 2022.
Humber River Health encompasses the evolution of our organizations into a truly integrated community health network that is driven by the vision of Lighting New Ways in Healthcare. Our new name signals a new chapter, and as with any new beginning, we believe it is important to reflect on the past to help calibrate us for the future.
Our people – staff, physicians, volunteers, Board of Directors, donors, and community – are our biggest strength and their contributions to our organizations throughout the past year have not gone unnoticed. Our team is comprised of talented, passionate, and dedicated professionals, all of whom continued to make significant sacrifices to provide lifesaving care in 2022. These organizations showed resilience and determination to provide unwavering patient- and family-centred care for our community.
It is our responsibility to consider and care for our team as best we can – empowering them in their work and enabling them to provide excellent patient care. We were proud to be recognized by Forbes as one of Canada’s Best Employers for Diversity in 2022 and named one of Greater Toronto’s Top Employers for 2023 by Mediacorp Canada Inc. As a top GTA employer, we were recognized for our forward-thinking workplace policies and programs in areas such as work atmosphere, employee benefits and communication, training and skills development, and community involvement.
Our desire is to continuously improve and expand on the success we have achieved as an employer. Last year, we conducted employee, physician, and volunteer engagement surveys to help us understand how we can evolve our practices to better meet the needs of those who invest their time and resources into our organizations. We conduct these surveys annually and they have become a key facilitator of communication and engagement with our team.
We continued to grow our partnerships, programs, and collaborations with healthcare service providers in the community, including with the North Western Toronto Ontario Health Team. Part of strengthening our culture is building on our commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) within the community of North West Toronto and among our staff, physicians, and volunteers. We launched our EDI Advisory Committee in 2022 that will build off the activities we have implemented to date and work to advance our efforts. The EDI Advisory Committee’s purpose is to support the planning, implementation and monitoring of action plans and initiatives that celebrate diversity and drive health and people equity.
We also continued to recognize and celebrate EDI through the formal celebration of related EDI awareness days and months, as well as religious observations. This included International Day of Pink, Pride Month, National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, and recognizing the observance of Ramadan, Vaisakhi, Passover, and Easter.
The diversity of our team is our greatest strength, and the unique contributions and skillsets of every individual is what makes innovation our differentiator. In March 2022, Humber was the first health organization in Canada to integrate Intellijoint HIP technology that offers faster and more accurate hip replacement surgeries. Humber was also the second hospital in Canada and first in Ontario to offer thorough and minimally invasive treatment of fibroids through the Acessa ProVu© system. Our commitment to adopting new innovations and technologies made us a natural fit for hosting the Surgical Innovation Showcase at our Wilson site and led to us being recognized on Newsweek’s list of the World’s Best Smart Hospitals for 2023.
We are passionate about applying our innovative approach to care in areas beyond medical technology. This is exemplified in the continued progress we made constructing the Humber Meadows Long-Term Care Home in 2022. Humber Meadows is designed to meet the long-term care needs of our community by promoting dignified ageing and patient-centred care. We are ambitious and hopeful that Humber Meadows will inspire other healthcare providers to join us in revolutionizing seniors’ care.
Our innovative approach to care makes us equally passionate about academics and expanding educational and teaching opportunities at Humber. We have worked diligently to further develop and advance our Schulich Family Medicine Teaching Unit, which was launched this year. Our existing education initiatives continued with success in 2022, including our Internal Medicine Teaching Group who won the Queen’s University Regional Education Team Award for advancing medical education in community sites.
Humber’s unwavering commitment to quality care was recognized twofold over the past year. The Canadian College of Health Leaders and 3M Canada Company awarded our HEART team the 3M Health Care Quality Team Award. We were also named a Meritorious Hospital by the American College of Surgeons’ (ACS) National Surgical Quality Improvement Program. ACS recognized 78 of 607 eligible hospitals and Humber was one of only six hospitals in Canada to receive this award.
We also aim to apply our focus on quality to how we care for our environment and operate with sustainability in mind. We were proud to have our “lean, green, and digital” mandate acknowledged in 2022 by receiving the Stryker Environmental Excellence Award in silver and being recognized as a case study in world-class energy efficiency by Greening Health Care (GHC). This recognition was the result of our infrastructure achieving award-winning levels of energy and water efficiency, as well as having strategies in place to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Our thoughtful and ambitious design and planning for efficiency placed Humber as second in GHC’s international benchmarking of more than 280 large, urban acute care hospitals from Canada, the United States, and Europe.
We further established our position as a global healthcare leader in 2022, and our willingness to think creatively about improving health outcomes made a difference for patients. The Canadian Institute for Health Information reported that our patient experience results exceeded provincial and national averages and surpassed that of our peer hospitals. This accomplishment was a testament to the investment of our team in the experience of our patients and their health journeys.
Many of this would not be possible without the support of our donors who allow us to stay at the forefront of innovation, expand our investment in life-saving programs and explore new ways to deliver the best care possible to our patients. Our innovative Robotic Surgery Program would simply not exist without our donors. We launched our 3-year Robotic Surgery Expansion Campaign in September 2022 and over $5 million has already been raised and pledged. Donor support is what allows us to dream bigger and extend our mission far beyond the hospital walls. We are grateful to our cherished supporters for their unwavering commitment to our mission.
It is this focus and commitment on improving patient outcomes that made 2022 an outstanding year for Humber. We focused on our vision, mission and values, and achieved significant milestones to the benefit of our organizations, community, and healthcare. We are excited for continued growth as we embrace our new identities as Humber River Health and the Humber River Health Foundation.
Thank you for joining us in the journey.
