St. Joseph’s Health Centre continues to work on many initiatives to support our commitment to Creating a Culture of Inquiry and Innovation. We are pleased to share with you – our community of staff, physicians, patients, families and learners – our accomplishments from over the last year in our 2011/2012 Annual Report.

Creating a Culture of Inquiry and Innovation is really about how we make learning, teaching and professional development a priority in the work we do at St. Joe’s.

Over the last year, we have seen a considerable amount of collaborative activity between the Office of Medical Education and the Interprofessional Education and Collaboration Department. This joint partnership and cohesive work in the areas of education and learning continues to move us forward in achieving our Vision to be Canada’s Best Community Teaching Hospital.

So what does it mean to be the best? Part of that includes providing the best learning experience possible for our trainees and staff. We know that enhancing our culture that learns with, from and about one another will help us to provide the best care to the patients and families we are honoured to serve.

Given our continued focus on the importance of interprofessional education, collaboration and practice, the Office of Medical Education and the Interprofessional Education and Collaboration Department worked in partnership to create an Interprofessional Education (IPE) Strategic Plan.

This is the first plan of its kind for St. Joe’s and will help to focus all of our ideas, activities and plans to support education for staff and students, from all professions. It will provide us with a footprint and guide us to build on our successes in fostering the best learning environment for students and to support continuing education initiatives for our staff and physicians. It will also help to focus our work in developing new and innovative ways to enhance the teaching and learning atmosphere we provide.

To help guide the process, we used the Interprofessional Collaborative Organization Map and Preparedness Assessment (IP-COMPASS) tool, which is a quality improvement framework used to help hospitals become better prepared in providing intentional interprofessional learning experiences.

Through the process we identified the need to further enhance they way we recognize, celebrate and honour all of our physicians and staff that have given so much of their time and effort to support learning and their dedication to teaching the next generation of health professionals at St. Joe’s.

This year we established several new initiatives that we identified as part of the IP Strategic Plan including our Education Council, Academic Achievement Day and Interprofessional Award to recognize excellence in interprofessional practice and education.

The Education Council will serve as a venue for staff, physicians and students to discuss Health Centre-wide issues on education, essentially to move the organization forward in a consistent direction towards achieving our Vision. Representatives will include individuals from different professions across the hospital and in the months ahead we will be developing a Terms of Reference and formal membership.

Plans for our first Academic Achievement Day were also developed this year which solidified our dedication to recognizing our clinical teachers who have been awarded internally and externally by various organizations and showcasing best practice research.

As we continue to move our culture to embrace education – both clinical and interprofessional – the creation of our Academic Achievement Day will provide a more appropriate and inclusive recognition event and celebration. A number of these recognition practices have been ongoing at the Health Centre previously but with a more clinical and physician focus, as part of our Annual Clinical Day. In creating a new, stand alone event to celebrate all of our teachers, is just another way we are working to create an environment that reflects learning based on the core competencies of collaboration including knowledge of roles, trust and respect, appreciating differences and conflict resolution, willingness to share power, and shared decision making

We continue to build on our well established educational initiatives such as our Interprofessional Journal Club, Preceptor/Mentorship Program, our Annual Clinical Day and Interprofessional Skills Fair. Coming this winter is our third Interprofessional Conference on Arthritis Management, which is designed as a continuing education opportunity for family physicians, specialists and members of various health disciplines at the Health Centre. We continue to look at other similar events in other clinical areas because of the continued success of this conference as a way of enhancing our professional development activities.

With the many activities we offer at St. Joe’s to support learning, we continue to find ways to support the intreprofessional academic curriculum by accrediting activities through the University of Toronto’s Centre for Interprofessional Education. By accrediting our opportunities, not only does it enable our students to take part in important Health Centre wide initiatives but fully supports the academic requirements of our students.

In addition to providing funds for ongoing education through our Education Assistance Grant, this year we also established a scholarship with funding received by the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities called the MTCU Clinical Preceptor Award, to acknowledge clinicians – specifically in the areas of physiotherapy, occupational therapy and speech language pathology – who demonstrate excellence in teaching. We provided two recipients with $1,000 each to support ongoing educational opportunities such as attending professional development conferences related to their field of work.

It continues to be an exciting time for all of us at St. Joe’s in building more of our programs to support learning. One more way that we can continue to create innovation and new knowledge will be through the development of our on-site Learning Centre.

The new Learning Centre will provide an expansion of teaching and educational space for of our medical trainees, health professional staff and students. By having an on-site, dedicated space to education, we can conduct workshops, seminars and other activities that are accessible to everyone at St. Joe’s. The new Learning Centre will be hub of all of our important educational activities and we are working closely with St. Joseph’s Health Centre Foundation to ensure that we are successful in fundraising initiatives to support the new Centre.

As we look back at all of our accomplishments from last year, it shows that we are dedicated to building educational excellence - an ongoing and very important priority for St. Joseph’s. We are proud to have a long and rich tradition of providing high quality and compassionate care and we also take pride in the fact that we have established a stellar reputation for learning and teaching excellence in a community hospital setting.

We see that reflected in the thousands of students we welcome each year, who chose to start their career through learning at St. Joe’s; and with the many staff and physicians that continually strive to enhance their professional skills to respond to changes in health care to support the organization’s committment to Put Patients First by providing the best care.

We look forward to the many ways we will continue to learn, innovate and inspire to achieve academic excellence and to support our work in achieving our Vision to be Canada’s Best Community Teaching Hospital.