MESSAGE FROM:
Terry Leon, Chair, Board of Directors
Alan Spergel. Chair, Board of Directors Foundation
Barbara Collins, President & CEO Humber River Hospital
Sandra Sualim, President & CEO Humber River Hospital Foundation
This past year will always be remembered for the devastating effect COVID-19 had on our community of North West Toronto. In our hospital alone, we provided care to over 4,318 patients with COVID-19. To the families and friends of those who died of COVID-19, our thoughts are with you. For those who bore the brunt of this disease, we offer overwhelming gratitude to our staff, physicians, and volunteers of Humber River Hospital who fought with courage and compassion, partnering to overcome many obstacles to protect each other and our patients.
Humber played an instrumental role throughout the year in caring for our community during the COVID-19 crisis. Early in the pandemic, we partnered with 18 Long-Term Care Homes and Retirement Homes to establish a community of practice to manage infection control, patient care, staff shortages, and vaccines. That relationship continues today as we will take forward all we learn to the new LTC home awarded Humber River Hospital (HRH) currently being built on the Finch Avenue Site of HRH. The Humber Meadows Long-Term Care Home is currently slated to open in August 2022.
We conducted over 130,834 tests at our COVID-19 Assessment Centres. We deepened our relationships with our Ontario Health Team partners and coordinated with all levels of government to develop and implement high-capacity vaccine clinics, both fixed and mobile serving the entire community resulting in the vaccination of more than 185,000 residents to date. We are also proud to say that our long-standing focus on innovation in care never wavered during the pandemic. We developed along with our Ontario Health Team partner a mobile unit equipped to travel to the hardest-hit communities in Toronto and provide vaccines to those who face health, transportation, or economic barriers. We pivoted our care delivery models with the launch of a Virtual Urgent Care Clinic that filled the gap of traditional in-person urgent care services. This ensured patients were always supported in whatever health circumstances they were facing. Our Intensive Care Unit, designed for 44 patients, surged to provide life-saving treatment for up to 68 patients at a time through the incredible work of our ICU nurses and staff. Over 50 of our doctors even re-trained to become ICU nurses to help our team manage through the worst. We accommodate over 1,500 students at HRH annually. We cannot begin to thank all of those who came to work day in and day out in the most difficult of circumstances. Please read our Chief of Staff’s beautiful and heart-wrenching story and his experience as an ICU nurse.
To accommodate the impact of COVID-19, we opened additional critical beds and medical surgical beds to provide care for the community and yet at the peak of Wave 3 transferred a number of critical patients to other hospitals in Ontario to ensure their care needs could be met. We thank the Critical Care Command Table, Ontario Health and partner organizations for helping ensure care for our community.
We launched HEART (Humber’s Elderly Assess and Restore Team), a mobile service that helps seniors transition from hospital to home safely and effectively, avoiding more hospitalizations. We extended our in-hospital clinical deterioration monitoring capability to long-term care, initially at Villa Colombo and then beyond, helping to catch potential events with our seniors before they require hospital intervention. And we launched a new program with the Registered Nurses Association of Ontario to raise awareness and provide education on new ways to help dementia patients, resulting in a reduction in behavioural incidents and a reduced length of stay. We are proud of how we are helping change the nature of seniors’ care in Ontario.
We thank our donors and partners for equipping us with the resources to meet the critical needs of our community, especially in the tumultuous year that we all experienced. And we thank our community for always supporting our staff and frontline workers. When we launched our Humber Frontline Support Fund and COVID-19 Emergency Response Fund, community members donated over $1.9M, along with their time and resources to help keep us going. The daily displays of appreciation from banging pots to parades past the hospital to endless emails and letters of thanks – they mean the world to us.
Our accomplishments were not only COVID-related. We are proud to say in the past year; we have attracted two new research chairs to advance HRH as a community-academic hospital. We have been invited to join the Toronto Academic Health Sciences Network – a significant step forward for our organization. We have begun to roll out Generation 3 of our HRH Command Centre, which extends its clinical support tools to our community partners within our OHT so together we can all provide the best interventions at the best times to minimize the need for urgent and acute care.
With significant progress being made, we now look with anticipation toward a post-pandemic world. With one goal, one community, and one hope at our core: Lighting New Ways in Healthcare. Together, Humber River Hospital and Humber River Hospital Foundation will continue to leverage our innovations, technologies, and patient-centred programs to deliver the highest quality care and light new ways in healthcare.
