Caring for Our Patients
| Caring for Our Patients |
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As a community teaching hospital, our priority is to provide the highest quality of patient care and safety throughout our Clinical Support Services and five program areas: Women’s, Children’s and Family Health; Emergency, Critical Care and Access Services; Medicine, Ambulatory and Seniors’ Health; Mental Health and Addiction Services; and Surgery and Oncology Services. Empowering our Patients Ask. Talk. Listen. This is the message St. Joseph’s Health Centre has brought to its patients to empower them to take their care and, as a result, their safety into their own hands. A hospital-wide patient safety initiative has been launched in partnership with the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care and the Ontario Hospital Association. Patients and their families are to ask the healthcare team questions. Five common sense tips help empower patients to speak up and share valuable information like allergies or any current medications they are taking and play an important role in each stage of their care.
The Right Care in the Right Place at the Right Time: Improving Access and Flow
St. Joseph’s is on the cutting edge of providing the right care in the right place and at the right time. In November we were recognized by Toronto Emergency Medical Services for having the highest performing Emergency Department in the Greater Toronto Area for ambulance offload times (PDF). Short offload times mean that a patient is transferred quickly from the care of the ambulance crew to hospital staff - allowing the patient to get the right care in the right place putting the crew back on the road to help the next patient in need. Our success was built on developing a series of leading practices as well as using technology to help us move our patients through the Health Centre efficiently while ensuring care of the highest quality. St. Joe’s was one of the first hospitals in Canada to implement an electronic system that functions like a hospital version of “air traffic control”. This system built by Teletracking Technologies provides a real-time status of every patient in every hospital bed, following patients from the admission to discharge process and allows us to place the right patient in the most appropriate bed. We decrease delays by increasing communication among staff and having a clean bed ready for the next patient as soon as someone is discharged. St. Joseph’s vision of being the leader in improving access and flow was recognized with the
Our Role in Educating the Next Generation of Healthcare Professionals An integral part of St. Joseph’s Vision to be Canada’s Best Community Teaching Hospital is educating the next generation of healthcare professionals. This is evident in our commitment to life-long learning and in our ingrained philosophy of interprofessional collaboration. We teach and help each other grow as healthcare professionals so that we can provide the best, most efficient, care to our patients - both now and in the future. |
Access to care, and the seamless and timely movement of patients as they receive care is crucial to outstanding quality and service and the best outcomes. 
Medtronix Leading Practices Award at the OHA HealthAchieve 2007, North America’s premier healthcare show. The award was for our presentation: “A Better and Safer Patient Experience of Care: Setting New Standards in Patient Access and Flow”, an outline of the Health Centre’s groundbreaking initiative to provide better, safer and more timely care by improving patient access and flow.