Welcome to UHN's first Education Impact Report. This report is unlike anything we've done before in the education portfolios. Our goal is to show you the incredible groundwork that we've accomplished in our four divisions – The Michener Institute, Clinical Education, Professional Development and Innovation and Research – so that we can plan and prepare for the future of healthcare education at UHN. I'm proud to show you our education vision and strategies for addressing some of the biggest healthcare challenges in recent times, in particular the immense health and human resource crisis that we're facing today.
Professional roles in healthcare look different than they did three years ago. Many of us are reinventing and reimagining our positions and finding creative ways to support and nurture our teams. To do this, we need accessible education so that we can meet these new needs and provide better care to our patients. Education must also be present at all levels from onboarding new staff to team huddles to leadership interactions. Everyone at UHN is part of the education team.
Other important initiatives at UHN, and essential steps in education, are
Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Accessibility and Anti-Racism (IDEAA) and
UHNWomen. We need to empower and better understand TeamUHN and the barriers for equity-seeking people within the organization. It's critical that we embed IDEAA and UHNWomen into our education environments, and our education departments are fully dedicated to this. I'm excited to see the work we'll do in collaboration with IDEAA and UHNWomen and as we fold this work into our teaching and learning systems.
I also want to congratulate the Epic team on the extraordinary launch of UHN's electronic patient records system in June 2022. This was a massive initiative that required
rapid and clear education for diverse audiences across our hospitals.
Outstanding education leads to staff engagement, competence and staff retention. Education at UHN is committed to this notion, and together we will pave a bright future in healthcare.
Dr. Brian Hodges
Executive Vice President, Education, and Chief Medical Officer, UHN
Since founded in 1958, The Michener Institute has created programs that anticipated future shortages within the healthcare system and graduated thousands of students with the knowledge, skills and competencies to meet these emerging and evolving needs. Last year, Michener accelerated its long-term goal of ensuring Canada has an adequate supply of critically-needed health professionals by
forming new agreements with Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia to help increase training capacity for healthcare positions that are in high demand. Michener also became the only school in Canada to offer a Master's degree in
Cardiovascular Perfusion and launched a new program in
Digital Health & Data Analytics to meet the needs of the healthcare system.
Thanks to the generous support of its donors, Michener offers over $84,000 in scholarships, bursaries and awards for students enrolled in full-time programs. In 2022, the school introduced two new scholarships – one in memory of
Kevin Taylor a cherished colleague and leader across Canada's respiratory therapy community, and the
Paragon Orthotic Laboratory Clinical Education Award.
For more than 60 years, Michener has provided an advanced level of education and training to generations of healthcare professionals – those we rely on for accurate and compassionate diagnosis and treatment of disease. Michener alumni like
Jia Inacio carry this legacy and Michener's commitment to advanced practice forward as they become healthcare leaders and introduce the next generation of graduates to the clinical setting.
With more than 6,000 clinical learners passing through UHN sites every year, clinical education and teachers are at the heart of providing rich experiential learning experiences and supporting the needs of clinical students, residents and fellows – our partners in providing the best care possible for patients.
Clinical education today is about building stronger teams and changing conventional models of care so that we can ease the load of healthcare workers and find creative ways to address the stressful staff shortage in hospitals and clinics. One example of this work is
a clinical extern program to support clinical teams at the point of care. There are now 240 clinical student externs across UHN, the majority being nursing students, and many have been hired as new clinical staff at UHN. Another future-proofing initiative is a partnership between the Joint Department of Medical Imaging and The Michener Institute to support students in their final year of a medical imaging program to work as
clinical externs and lift some of the burden from exhausted hospital staff.
With all of this work, learners at UHN need a physical space where they can study, hone their clinical skills and even decompress. Last year,
UHN opened the new Education Centre at Toronto Western Hospital, and a similar space at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre opened in early 2023.
This education and progress couldn't happen without
libraries curating and sharing accurate knowledge. And at UHN, we're now carrying our libraries around with us on our phones and laptops so that digital resources are available as soon as we need them. UHN's libraries are also embracing the
concept of health narratives as a way to use personal stories for clinical learning – another example of how libraries are an innovative and ever-changing space.
The success of our clinical learners would not be possible without the dedication and commitment of our clinical teachers –
and we are supporting them with the educational tools and resources at every step. Our priority is to promote the growth of clinical teachers in their educational roles and opportunities for collaboration. We're grateful to clinical teachers who have worked so hard to keep our learners engaged and on-track, and who have become mentors to new and current healthcare professionals.
In our healthcare landscape, we're not educating people for the practice and patient care that we see today. Instead, we're anticipating tomorrow. At the same time, we're facing a critical shortage in health human resources; the biggest crisis in healthcare since the COVID-19 pandemic began. And as we aim to keep pace with this present reality and the future, professional development needs continue to change quickly.
This context of change and the need for rapid, new and innovative collaborations have led to the creation of UHN Education's new Professional Development division, with the goal of finding short- and long-term strategies to make education equitable and accessible to all of TeamUHN. This division is working to remove silos across departments, sites, programs and professions so that education is more integrated and embedded into everyday work and practice.
And the Professional Development team is well equipped to face this task. Many of them were part of planning and building the rapid-response education that happened at the beginning of the pandemic, including resources like
COVIDcarelearning.ca – an
award-winning online education package that bridges healthcare professionals' knowledge with the skills to care for those affected by COVID-19 in acute, long-term and community care settings. The Ontario Workforce Reserve for Seniors Support is another example of rapid health professions education which prepared people for two new roles in healthcare – Resident Support Aides in long-term care and Hospital Support Aides. These initiatives, in partnership with the Ontario Ministry of Health and Ontario Health, were experiments in rapid collaboration.
Our initiative this year is the creation of UHN's first organization-wide Professional Development strategy. Along with Collaborative Academic Practice, Medical Affairs and People & Culture, our strategy strives to
restore and inspire hope and meaning by strengthening our UHN culture of learning. Throughout COVID-19, shadowing and redeployment offered people a welcome change and a different way to connect to our organizational mission. We're exploring these models and others (such as mentoring and workplace-based learning) as part of our professional development strategy.
Although the Professional Development division is in the early planning and strategy phase, one thing is clear: the future of education at UHN is full of progressive learning solutions for all across the UHN network.
