|
There are 22 hospitals in Ontario that have teaching or research
affiliations with one of the 5 university medical (or health
sciences) schools in the province. As such, there are five
Academic Health Sciences ‘Centres’ in Ontario,
which include: London, Hamilton, Toronto, Kingston, and Ottawa.
The Northern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM) is the first
new medical school to be created in Canada since McMaster
School of Medicine in the early 1970s. NOSM has affiliation
agreements with both Sudbury Regional Hospital and Thunder
Bay Regional Sciences Centre. Together with Sudbury and NOSM,
TBRHSC is on track to be Ontario’s 6th Academic Health
Sciences Centre.
Traditional Academic Health Sciences Centres have the following
three mandates:
- The provision of highly specialized and sophisticated
clinical services.
- The education of future physicians, specialists and many
other health professionals
- The conduct of health (basic, clinical and applied) research
and development.
The alignment of a medical school and a hospital creates
a critical mass of resources that inspires expertise and capacity
for leading edge patient care, education and research. With
this critical mass of expertise, Academic Health Science Centres
are expected to:
- Provide leadership in the transformation of health care
delivery and health systems change.
- Support the development of best practices, clinical directives,
clinical pathways, evidence based medicine, benchmarking and
quality improvement initiatives to make medical care better
and safer for patients.
- Have strong hospital-based Health Research Institutes with
internationally competitive research programs that position
them to provide leadership in innovation and knowledge transfer.
Although we do not know today exactly how our Academic Health
Sciences Centre with NOSM will evolve over the coming months
and years, this is a time of great opportunity for Thunder
Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre to develop a teaching
and research structure that will attract the critical mass
of expertise and resources required for TBRHSC to become a
leader in healthcare delivery, research and teaching.
The new Strategic Plan lays out a vision for our evolution
to an Academic Health Sciences Centre by 2010, as well as
a series of missions, objectives and action steps for 2006/2007
to create the appropriate infrastructure to support this exciting
transition. For more information about Academic Health Sciences
Centres, please visit the Council
of Academic Hospitals of Ontario (CAHO) website.
EDUCATION:
To provide the best learning environment and curriculum for
students, residents, and interns, our organization must ensure
that both our physical environment will respond to the needs
of a larger volume of learners, and that our staff and physicians
have the tools and resources to provide the best quality academic
experience.
The staff and physicians at Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences
Centre have been teaching health professionals since Thunder
Bay Regional Hospital first opened its doors. Our legacy is
tremendous, however, our evolution to an Academic Health Sciences
Centre, through our affiliation with NOSM, will challenge
us to put even more of our energy and resources into academic
pursuits.
Early on, when the Northern Ontario School of Medicine was
developing and preparing for their charter class of medical
students that commenced studies in September of 2005, an “integration”
committee was established as a planning body to define how
TBRHSC would work with NOSM to provide the best learning experience
for their students. In 2006/2007, TBRHSC will work to reinvigorate
and expand the work of this committee to build our joint academic
agenda.
Although NOSM is the impetus for our transformation to an
Academic Health Sciences Centre, our commitment to teaching
crosses every health discipline. The Teaching and Research
Task Force that was formed through the Strategic Planning
process reported that approximately 412 students have clinical
placements in our facility each year. Students come from a
variety of institutions in their training to become nurses,
physicians, physical therapists, social workers, physicists,
MRTs, respiratory therapists, pharmacists, MLTs, health record
technicians, researchers and other professionals.
RESEARCH:
Similar to our need to create an academic plan for TBRHSC,
we also need to create a research strategic plan that will
help us to define our research priorities, the type and breadth
of research activity that we will engage (basic, clinical,
applied, translational), and the structures and resources
that will be required to support our research priorities.
The re-development of the former cancer centre at 290 Munro
Street into a Cancer and Cardiac Research Centre begins to
lay a framework for our research strategic plan. In addition,
the Molecular Medicine Research Centre (located in the same
facility) also sets the stage for future research pursuits.
The Strategic Plan breaks out into four key areas: (1) Teaching
and Research, (2) Organizational Transformation, (3) Regional
Service Integration, and (4) Enhanced quality and continuity
of patient care.
Dynamic organizational transformation is at the heart of
our new Strategy. To successfully develop and deploy research
and teaching structures and strategies, to improve the quality
of care we offer, and finally to provide the best support
and service to our regional hospitals, we must first improve
our corporate culture so that we have the energy and spirit
that will be required to embrace our new mandate as a leader
in healthcare.
Through the Employee and Physicians Satisfaction Survey (EPSS),
staff and physicians identified a need to be more engaged
in decision-making, and they also expressed concerns with
respect to the current functioning of our Care and System
Teams. To improve decision making, service delivery and system
performance, a key priority in the Strategic Plan is to review
and identify services that can be strategically re-aligned
and managed as service ‘bundles’ with physician
and non-physician co-leadership and appropriate funding to
achieve service goals.
Within the Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre, the
Cancer Program, and to a certain extent the Renal Program,
are managed as service bundles.
The patient is central to the new Strategic Plan. The ‘TORQ’
image is intended to communicate the momentum and energy that
will be created toward improved patient care as we successfully
transform our organizational culture and structures, develop
research and teaching programs, improve and expand tertiary
services to regional hospitals, and undertake focused initiatives
to improve quality and continuity of care. The four key priorities
represented by TORQ are the levers that create positive force
on the system to continually improve the care that we deliver.
:: back to top ::
:: back
to Strategic Planning::
|
Q.
What is an Academic Health Sciences Centre?
