Innovative Humber River joins Joint Centres

TORONTO – The Joint Centres for Transformative Healthcare Innovation is pleased to welcome Humber River Hospital as a new member. Humber River Hospital will join the six founding members – Mackenzie Health, Markham Stouffville Hospital, Michael Garron Hospital, North York General Hospital, Southlake Regional Health Centre, and St. Joseph’s Health Centre in their ongoing commitment to fostering a culture of innovation in healthcare.

Collectively, the Joint Centres hospitals have worked on a number of initiatives including violence prevention in the workplace and infection prevention and control. The partners have also spread a number of successful innovations including reducing the number of C-sections and Choosing Wisely – an Adopting Research to Improve Care (ARTIC) Program supported project aimed at reducing unnecessary medical treatments.

More recently they have added strategies to reduce harm as an area of focus. These are consistent with the overall objectives of collaboration and innovation, engagement, awareness and advocacy and capacity.

The partnership is active throughout the year and once a year has a showcase for the hospitals and other partners to highlight some of the innovations and collaborations. This year, the showcase, InnovationEx, will be celebrating its fifth year with an event on May 4th at the BMO Institute for Learning.

“We are thrilled to have Humber River Hospital join the Joint Centres partnership,” says Jo-anne Marr, chair of the collaborative and president and CEO of Markham Stouffville Hospital. “We have had great success to date and are looking to further that success with a new partner. Humber brings a great commitment to innovation and patient care and we are so excited to be working with the team.”

With Humber joining the Joint Centres, all large hospitals in the Central LHIN are now members – further increasing the ability to impact patient care across that LHIN. “Through the Joint Centres, we have the ability to impact over a million patients and that is tremendously exciting,” says Marr.

“At this time in Humber River Hospital’s evolution, we thought it was a great time to join the Joint Centres and become a full partner,” says Barb Collins (pictured), president and CEO, Humber River Hospital. “With our move to a brand-new building, we had the opportunity to build innovation into our everyday practice. We are excited to share that learning with our Joint Centres partners and to benefit from the great work that they have been doing for the past five years.”

About the Joint Centres for Transformative Healthcare Innovation

The Joint Centres is a partnership between seven large community hospitals focused on collaboration and sharing to improve quality, safety and performance in health care. The Joint Centres comprise Humber River Hospital, Mackenzie Health, Markham Stouffville Hospital, Michael Garron Hospital, North York General Hospital, Southlake Regional Health Centre and St. Joseph’s Health Centre Toronto. The goals are to: seek and share innovative ideas that improve service delivery and/or value across the system, serve as a living laboratory to demonstrate innovation, provide a forum for the rapid execution of new ideas, technologies, products and processes to improve system performance and create opportunities for shared innovation, learning and knowledge transfer among the member organizations, their staff and physicians.