KINGSTON, Ont. – After months of behind the scenes preparations, Hotel Dieu Hospital and Kingston General Hospital have joined together to create Kingston Health Sciences Centre (KHSC). The new hospital corporation became an official legal entity on Saturday, April 1, 2017.

The new hospital corporation has a single Board of Directors, CEO and Executive Team. It also has one budget and will develop and implement one corporate strategy for both sites. David Pichora (pictured), formerly the president and CEO of Hotel Dieu Hospital, has been named CEO of the new organization.

The organizations decided the time was right for a merger when the role of CEO at Kingston General became vacant last year.

Staff at both sites are all now employees of KHSC, which makes it one of the largest public sector employers, and the largest hospital corporation, in southeastern Ontario.

But along with these changes, much is remaining the same for patients and families. Under KHSC, each site will continue to fulfill its unique role, with the KGH site providing complex-acute and specialty care and the HDH site providing acute-ambulatory care.

The HDH site will retain its Catholic identity and mission while the KGH site will remain secular.

For the time being, both hospital sites will keep their existing websites, email addresses and phone numbers so that everyone can still contact the hospital sites with ease.

To celebrate the integration, staff, physicians, learners, volunteers and patients walked from their respective hospital sites and met in a park – a midway point between the two hospitals – to unveil a plaque that will mark the spot where a maple tree will be planted later this spring to symbolize the future growth of the new KHSC.

“Our walk symbolized what it means for us to join as equal partners,” says Adrian Storm, chair of the patient family council at HDH. “Each team came from a place that holds deep meaning for us and we met together in the park that stretches between these two historic hospital sites.”

To learn more about KHSC, including the makeup of the inaugural Board of Directors and Executive Team, visit the special integration website at www.kingstonhsc.com.