Shaping a strong and sustainable future for health care
Guided by our Vision, patient-inspired health care without boundaries, William Osler Health System (Osler) took significant steps over the past year towards our goal of building a strong, unified and inclusive health system that will continue to serve our diverse communities today and for generations to come.
As we mark the last year of our 2019-2024 Strategic Plan, Going Beyond for Healthier Communities, we take pride in knowing that, with this roadmap as our guide, we advanced care for our patients and families in meaningful and lasting ways.
Read our 2023-24 Annual Report to learn more about how our leading-edge approaches to care, integration of patient and family insights and strong partnerships helped enhance patient care, and how we will continue to build on this solid foundation as we transform our services and programs to support healthier communities in the years ahead.
Board Chair and President and CEO message Clinical leadership message Osler by the numbers 2023-24 highlights 2023-24 financial statements 2023-24 Osler Foundation community report
Message from Osler’s Board Chair and President and CEO |
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Thanks to the collective efforts of Osler team members, and our many health, community and government partners, Osler continued to Go Beyond for our patients, their families and one another in 2023-24. Our commitment to this Promise continues to serve as a north star and inspire our work every day. As we prepare for the next exciting chapter in our journey, and the launch of our new strategic plan to guide us, we are proud to share some of the many Going Beyond moments from the past year. After all, our successes are your successes as we all work together to deliver on our Mission of 'innovative health care delivered with compassion' to our communities. In 2023-24, responding to our region’s increasingly complex health needs, we redefined the limits of what community hospitals can achieve. Our patients benefited from being able to access highly specialized services close to home – procedures that were previously only available in academic hospitals. We also established new partnerships to ensure that patients discharged from hospital have the supports they need while recovering at home. We also made great progress on our key priorities this past year. This includes planning for Toronto Metropolitan University’s new School of Medicine, establishing a comprehensive cancer care centre, transforming Peel Memorial into Brampton’s second hospital and moving closer to becoming an academic health centre. We’re confident that these priories will help ensure our communities continue to receive exemplary, people, and community-centred care for years to come. Additionally, staff and physician wellbeing remained a priority in 2023-24. To help take care of the extraordinary people who take care of our patients, we expanded our health and wellness programming, improved access to growth opportunities and strengthened our recognition program. We also initiated a highly successful recruitment campaign to attract more top talent, while investing in the workforce of tomorrow as the primary clinical partner for our region’s new SoM. Finally, as one of only a few community hospitals in Canada engaged in clinical research, we proudly celebrated our growing Research Program’s 10th anniversary and its many contributions to generating better health outcomes for our region’s unique and vulnerable populations. Together, we’re transforming for healthier communities, and with a new five-year strategic plan that builds on this momentum launching this fall to guide us, it truly is an extraordinary time for Osler and the communities we serve Join us as we continue to Go Beyond to shape a strong and sustainable future for health care in our region.
Linda Franklin, Board Chair; and Dr. Frank Martino, President and CEO |
Message from Osler’s clinical leadership |
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Guided by our Values, Osler’s team members continued to showcase their unwavering commitment to exemplary, high-quality care in a year characterized by resilience, compassion and clinical transformation. Responding to an ever-evolving workplace culture that promotes, inspires and recognizes ingenuity, our staff and physicians led several innovative initiatives to further improve patient outcomes, enhance service design and delivery, and ensure a world-class experience for our patients, their families and loved ones. Thanks to their efforts, Osler patients had access to highly specialized life-changing heart rhythm surgery, robot-assisted knee replacements and state-of-the-art cancer therapy for blood cancers, close to home, eliminating the need for travel outside our communities. We know for many among our most vulnerable populations, this can mean the difference between receiving or not receiving care. To address ongoing challenges with hospital capacity and improve access to care, we continued to leverage strong relationships with our valued health and community partners to launch innovative programs that enable patients discharged from hospital to seamlessly continue their recovery in their homes. Accredited with Exemplary Standing by Accreditation Canada, its highest designation, our commitment to quality excellence shone through in everything we did this past year - and will continue to guide us as we look for new ways to further improve experiences for our patients, families and staff. We always take great pride in showcasing the many ways our team members are making a difference in the lives of patients, families and the communities we serve. No one says it better than the people whose lives have been impacted by Osler’s health care professionals. To learn more about just a few of the many faces behind innovative, compassionate care at Osler, check out what our patients have to say in our Doctors Making a Difference Campaign. As we prepare to embark on Osler’s next chapter, we feel privileged to lead and work alongside Osler’s clinical team members who show us every day what it means to deliver world-class, compassionate and inclusive care that touches and transforms people’s lives.
Kiki Ferrari, Executive Vice President and Chief Clinical Officer; Tiziana Rivera, Executive Vice President, Quality Research and Chief Nursing Executive; and Dr. Greg Rutledge, Chief of Staff and Executive Vice President, Medical and Academic Affairs |
Osler by the numbers
| Patient visits | Surgeries | Diagnostic services | Outpatient clinic visits |
|---|---|---|---|
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1,151,329 |
72,108 |
577,871 |
560,777 |
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 |
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| Emergency visits | Inpatient admissions | Virtual care visits | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
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300,962 |
52,592 |
57,951 |
7,953 |
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 |
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2023-24 highlights
Delivering safe, compassionate, high-quality care every time
In keeping with Osler's Vision of 'patient-inspired health care without boundaries', we continued to redefine the limits of what community hospitals can achieve.
We expanded our role as our region’s provider of choice for accessible, specialized care, allowing our patients to access treatments once only available in academic hospitals. This includes life-changing heart surgeries, robot-assisted knee replacements and state-of-the-art cancer therapy.
Thanks to the efforts of our high-performing teams, we achieved targets for all indicators in our 2023-24 Quality Improvement Plan (QIP). This includes improved medication management, empowering patients with the information they need to feel supported when leaving the hospital, enhancing the patient experience through more timely and efficient transitions as well as greater workplace health and safety. We remain committed to excellence in everything we do as we shift focus to a new set of targets in our 2024-25 QIP and ongoing quality initiatives.
Delivering health care our communities can rely on
In 2023-24, in response to our region’s increasingly complex health needs, Osler established new programs and partnerships that support timely access to care in the most appropriate setting.
This includes our Osler@Home Program, which helps ensure that patients who no longer require care in hospital to have the supports they need to safely and confidently recover at home. Their transition to home, in turn, means more bed availability for patients who need specialized in-hospital care.
We acknowledged and celebrated the one-year anniversary and reaccreditation of the launch of The Butterfly ApproachTM, an emotion-based, person-centred, model of care for patients living with dementia. Amid projections of a rise in our senior population, such programs will be crucial to maintaining our commitment to delivering exemplary care to our communities.
These are just a few of the ways in which our team members actively contribute, champion and model new and sustainable ways to deliver innovative care for our patients.
Changing the way our patients and community access and engage with their health care
We know that meaningful change takes time and effort – and in 2023-24 we continued to build the foundation for a strong, sustainable health care system of the future.
Partnerships and collaboration remained integral to our progress over the last year. As the primary clinical partner for a new School of Medicine, we continued to advance our role in cultivating the next generation of health care professionals and promoting medical innovations and breakthroughs. We celebrated a decade of research and laid the groundwork for the launch of a new research institute that will address the needs of our diverse, fast-growing population, harness the power of technology and optimize health care structures and support our journey to become an academic health centre.
Additionally, the redevelopment of Peel Memorial into Brampton’s second hospital and the expansion of cancer care services in our region remained a top priority for Osler. Each of these projects will help increase hospital and health care capacity in our community for years to come, as well as expand access to speciality services closer to home.
Inspiring the people of Osler to be their best and do their best
Our people are our priority. This sentiment continued to be a guiding principle throughout 2023-24 as we continued to foster a culture that supports our team members and the exemplary care they provide to our patients and their families. We expanded health and wellness programming, improved access to growth opportunities and strengthened our recognition programs. We also initiated a highly successful recruitment campaign to attract – and retain - more top talent at Osler and continued to cultivate a culture of innovation that promotes, inspires and recognizes ingenuity.
Through our Doctors Making a Difference campaign we listened to – and shared with pride – the experiences of some of the many people whose lives have been positively impacted by the care they received at Osler.
These initiatives focus on creating a sense of belonging that inspires people, now and for generations to come, to be and do their best for our patients and families, themselves and one another.
