Toronto Hospital For Sick Children: Peter Gilgan Family Patient Care Tower | 169m | 29s | Sick Kids | Stantec

Here is something I posted to another thread which may be applicable here too...

Toronto Coach Terminal Redevelopment | ?m | ?s | CreateTO

That's bleeding heart thinking there, Northern Light-san. We're giving those patients a free pass while staggering development...we can't have that! It'll make things worse for progress in this city... /s
urbantoronto.ca urbantoronto.ca


My background in EMS helicopter operations included providing initial site inspections for hospital heliports. However, that typically involved standing on the roof of an existing building (Sunnybrook and St Mikes) and eyeballing the available approach/departure routes.

To help me visualize a heliport located on top of the HSC tower, I reached out to @steveve who has taken the time to produce one of his amazing infographics.

Looking North, the HSC tower is in yellow.
HSC Tower.jpg


This needs to be studied by a comprehensive obstacle limitation survey, but I really can't see any reason why the heliport can not be relocated to the new tower.

Keep in mind that a heliport on the new tower would require altering the headings of the existing approach/departure corridor cones to a more northerly start point.

However, being positioned on the western edge of the new tower could open up additional approach/departure options (to the north over Queens Park, to the southwest, to the southeast).

I'll toss it back to other UT members about whether or not increasing the height of the zoning limitations is a good thing but keep in mind that altering the angle of the existing cones may overlay properties not currently impacted. Plus the new location could open up the potential of additional approach/departure corridors with the associated zoning restrictions.

I should clarify that the expansion of the approach/departure corridors for HSC and St Mikes is not to mitigate a risk to flight safety. There is nothing unsafe about current operations.

As I've indicated in other threads, limited approach/departure to H1 hospital heliports is a risk to patient outcomes.

There may be times that a narrow approach/departure corridor prevents an EMS helicopter from landing due to wind direction.

Landing at an alternate location and completing the transfer by land ambulance takes time that some patients can not afford.


Thank you @steveve !
 
*For this evening

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Community Consultation Meeting for 555 University Avenue (SickKids Hospital)​


Wednesday, April 3, 2024 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM
(UTC-04:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)

​

Register for webinar​

If you want to attend, register now. When your registration is approved, you'll receive an invitation to join the webinar.

6 p.m. - Introductions
6:10 - City Planning and Applicant Presentations
6:40 - Discussion
7:25 - Next Steps
 
Decision Report - Approval Recommended to the next meeting of TEYCC.


The only issue to get significant discussion is that the new build will marginally intrude into the City Hall protected view corridor. Staff have decided its minor and supportable.

Helipad still seems to be staying where it is........
 
Not directly tied to this building project, but this thread seems as apt as any.

U.S. publication Newsweek, which annually ranks hospitals around the Globe.... has decreed SickKids the world's best Pediatric hospital.

1757606299776.png


From:

rankings.newsweek.com

Pediatrics

Specialized hospitals are seeing explosive growth as patients search for physicians that provide advanced, targeted care.
rankings.newsweek.com rankings.newsweek.com

While all such listicles should be taken with a large grain of salt; no matter how well intended, fact-checked etc. they invariably involve subjective weighting..........., Newsweek's ratings are taken seriously in the sector.........and Sick Kids put out a Press Release acknowledging the recognition.

www.sickkids.ca

SickKids named world’s best children’s hospital

The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) has been named by Newsweek and Statista as the best children’s health-care centre in the world, topping the list of 250 children's hospitals globally.
www.sickkids.ca
 
Garamond said:
Wow! Now if only they could fix the broader healthcare system.
Click to expand...

Sick Kids is not the only quality leader we have, Newsweek named Princess Marg. the 9 oncology hospital in the world; meanwhile Toronto consistently sees 4 general hospitals in the top 50, with the General being #4, and Mt.Sinai, Sunnybrook and North General also ranked somewhere up there.

Toronto has more top ranked hospitals than any other city in North America; and most years is second only to Seoul, South Korea, world wide in this regard.

We don't lack for top tier quality people.

What we lack is enough of them (wait times) but also the ability to spread both leading tech and leading procedures to each hospital. (I'm not suggesting the most advanced transplant program in a small, rural, hospital, but rather bringing their
core services as they are up to best in class (basic ER, diagnostics, low risk pregnancy etc.) as well as spreading more advanced services to more locations where feasible.
 
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Northern Light said:
Sick Kids is not the only quality leader we have, Newsweek named Princess Marg. the 9 oncology hospital in the world; meanwhile Toronto consistently sees 4 general hospitals in the top 50, with the General being #4, and Mt.Sinai, Sunnybrook and North General also ranked somewhere up there.

Toronto has more top ranked hospitals than any other city in North America; and most years is second only to Seoul, South Korea, world wide in this regard.

We don't lack for top tier quality people.

What we lack is enough of them (wait times) but also the ability to spread both leading tech and leading procedures to each hospital. (I'm not suggesting the most advanced transplant program in a small, rural, hospital, but rather bringing their
core services as they are up to best in class (basic ER, diagnostics, low risk pregnancy etc.) as well as spreading more advanced services to more locations where feasible
Click to expand...
Really a shame if we have really great talent but our system doesn't fully leverage that and give patients ( average Canadians) the best experience at the end of the day.
 
In my opinion (healthcare worker in clinical labs, but not patient-facing) they (in Ontario) could do a lot to improve compensation for physicians (salary, benefits, money for overhead, etc.), and for nurses. Stop paying for private providers.

They're apparently addressing my first comment with Family physicians.
 
PL1 said:
In my opinion (healthcare worker in clinical labs, but not patient-facing) they (in Ontario) could do a lot to improve compensation for physicians (salary, benefits, money for overhead, etc.), and for nurses. Stop paying for private providers.

They're apparently addressing my first comment with Family physicians.
Click to expand...

Compensation is certainly part of it; though, for doctors, I don't think its key overall.

On doctors:

1) Until recently we were simply not making enough new ones, we hadn't opened a new medical school since NOSM, and most schools had minimal new spots open, so naturally, as doctors retired, there were insufficient replacements. We all but made it impossible it would be otherwise.

To the credit of the Ford government (something you won't see said in my posts often) they have addressed this, with TMU's new school now open and new medical schools being added at UTSC, Queen's Oshawa, and York U (Vaughan). They also increase the number of spots in existing schools.

2) The number of resident spots has been unreasonably constrained for a generation. There were literally barely enough spots to handle any grads from Ontario-based medical schools and virtually none for those educated out of province.
We successfully recruited many an immigrant doctor, only to have them wait year, after year, after year for a residency spot which never appeared.

3) For family docs in particular, but many others functioning as private businesses that bill fee-for-service, there have been workload issues, in particular, if you are a solo practitioner, there's no such thing as paid vacation, or paid sick days, and that leads to a lot of burn out. Moving towards family health teams and in general towards a mixed compensation model that includes based salary and/or capitation (per patient fee), as well as lesser fee-for-service helps address this and allow docs to take much needed time off without financial hardship.

4) We also stilfed many docs who were foreign trained and educated, by requiring residency (again), here, when we knew we had too few places, rather that simply recognizing credentials, and where appropriate, verifying linguistic fluency, followed by a brief period of supervision.

Again, amazingly, some credit due to the Ford gov't for making some good moves here with more supervision spots and more automatic credential recognition for those trained and practicing elsewhere in Canada, or the U.S., in particular.

On nurses:

1) For a number of years, we've seen a series of moves that reduce full-time employment for nurses in favour of part-time, that upskill select nurses (nurse-practitioners, higher skill RNs)...while down-skilling others RPNs, the latter of whom can be paid very meager wages with no benefits to speak of as contract staff. The move here has been to shift responsibility from a higher paid doctor to a lower paid nurse-prac., then from the RN to the lower paid RPN, and yet this generates very little savings, if any, due to mistakes, higher churn, overtime, and agency fees. What it does give hospitals is some budget flexibility, but generally at the cost of staff retention and a lesser standard of care.

2) On nurses, as noted, low-paid RPNs have taken much of the brunt of budget pressures, but RNs have also felt stress over increased responsibilities, patient loads, and having to deal w/errors or skill-set shortcomings from temp, agency nurses.

On both:

Covid we a huge burnout driver for many, all the worry, all the PPE took a lot out of a lot of people.

*****

Beyond the fixes to date, we need higher per capita hospital base budgets; we need to resolve the issue of far too many ORs sitting idle on weekends when trained surgeons are willing to do the work. Michael Garron, Sunnybrook and Bloorview had an excellent partnership that opened Bloorview's ORs on weekend......but it lasted only a few months before being wrapped as a successful pilot because the MoH didn't extend the funding.

Those sorts of mind-numbling dumb moves happen way too often.

We still have yet to fully deal an antiquainted referral system for specialists.

Hospitals are sometimes the author's of their own pain in that they often refuse to schedule a second ER doc overnight, (looking at you St. Mike's), which often contributes to suspect/delayed care, and leaves the morning shift facing huge backlogs they can't clear til after lunch. Short term savings, for longer term pain.

In my experience, most hospitals also don't run any post-surgical rehab on Sundays, which delays discharges for literally hundreds of patients province wide by at least one day, and maybe two, since patients who miss a day of rehab often regress.

Finally, the shortage of long-term care/transitional/rehab beds, most acute in the GTA, backlogs hospitals with people who don't belong in acute care, but are still not healthy enough to go home.

They just shuffled the funding formula for GTA LTCs again, maybe it will help; but I've become inured to disappointment on that file.

***

Bonus note: The government could let hospital poach the best private sector ideas for diagnostic imaging, and low-risk, high-volume elective surgeries.

The Cataracts places were pioneers (not without their problems) but who drove down the time in the O/R to just 15 minutes for a typical patient. Back when hospitals were taking 4x longer. That was partly a technology thing.....but it was also making the service 'stand alone' so that it wasn't encumbered by the large bureauacracy that any big hospital can become.

Shouldice also did similar for many orthopedic operations.

There's nothing unique about the private sector that allows them to do this, it simply requires separating the space, the organization and the costing for such to a stand-alone model.

Its a bit too much in the weeds to talk about why this works better..........but London Health Sciences was allowed to do what I am suggesting and it paid off for them really well.

Other hospitals have not had the same latitude, never mind incentive to go the same direction.
 
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Northern Light said:
Beyond the fixes to date, we need higher per capita hospital base budgets; we need to resolve the issue of far too many ORs sitting idle on weekends when trained surgeons are willing to do the work. Michael Garron, Sunnybrook and Bloorview had an excellent partnership that opened Bloorview's ORs on weekend......but it lasted only a few months before being wrapped as a successful pilot because the MoH didn't extend the funding.
Click to expand...
On weekend surgeries. Sunnybrook has been doing Saturday Ortho (knee/hip) for the past few months, as has the Holland Orthopedic Hospital (part of Sunnybrook). And today we started doing alternating Saturdays with simple genitourinary and head and neck surgeries
 
PL1 said:
On weekend surgeries. Sunnybrook has been doing Saturday Ortho (knee/hip) for the past few months, as has the Holland Orthopedic Hospital (part of Sunnybrook). And today we started doing alternating Saturdays with simple genitourinary and head and neck surgeries
Click to expand...

Good to hear.
 
Northern Light said:
Not directly tied to this building project, but this thread seems as apt as any.

U.S. publication Newsweek, which annually ranks hospitals around the Globe.... has decreed SickKids the world's best Pediatric hospital.

View attachment 680356

From:

rankings.newsweek.com

Pediatrics

Specialized hospitals are seeing explosive growth as patients search for physicians that provide advanced, targeted care.
rankings.newsweek.com rankings.newsweek.com

While all such listicles should be taken with a large grain of salt; no matter how well intended, fact-checked etc. they invariably involve subjective weighting..........., Newsweek's ratings are taken seriously in the sector.........and Sick Kids put out a Press Release acknowledging the recognition.

www.sickkids.ca

SickKids named world’s best children’s hospital

The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) has been named by Newsweek and Statista as the best children’s health-care centre in the world, topping the list of 250 children's hospitals globally.
www.sickkids.ca
Click to expand...
Just one data point, but I have a friend with a child who has numerous serious medical issues. He is so grateful for the world-class care at SickKids. He said the professionalism, expertise and compassion his family has received has simply blown them away.
 
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