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Clinical Services Planning

Transforming Care
Planning Clinical Services For Scarborough

Clinical Services Planning

Clinical Services Planning

SHN has innovatively reviewed our clinical programs to find new ways to deliver leading health services to our community, and ensure patients and families have access to the best possible care here in Scarborough.

We are committed to providing exceptional care at all of our hospitals with access to core services such as emergency departments, laboratories, medical imaging, and pharmacy. We will also have specialized programs across our three hospitals to ensure that you get the care you need, when you need it, closer to home.

About Transforming Care

What is Transforming Care?

Transforming Care is about providing the best services across our three hospitals.

This involves a comprehensive review of SHN’s clinical programs, the needs of our community, and our changing health-care landscape — with the goal of finding the best way to deliver services that meets your needs now, and in the coming years.

This process is known as clinical services planning, and is routinely carried out every several years by hospitals here in Canada and around the world.

This is the opportunity to build a truly connected network for health care in Scarborough. SHN has three hospitals — Birchmount, Centenary, and General — and eight community health-care sites. Through Transforming Care, we will find the best way to combine and distribute our clinical programs and expertise, and equipment, technology, and resources across our network so that we can offer exceptional and world-class services right here in Scarborough.


We will meet the increasing demand for our services. By analyzing current trends and looking ahead to the future, we can better understand the needs of our patients. This will allow us to plan services in the best way for our community.


Transforming Care will improve and standardize the patient experience across all of our hospitals. We will focus on exceptional quality and safety of care.

Our Transforming Care process will include the development of the following deliverables:

  • Decision-Making Framework
  • Current State and Future Needs Report
  • Recommendation Report that identifies services to invest and divest, key partnerships, and improvement opportunities to ensure sustainability
  • Final Clinical Services Plan that outlines our service delivery roadmap and implementation plan

Transforming Care at SHN will be closely aligned with our Strategic Plan and guided by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) quadruple aim:

  1. Improving the health of our population,
  2. Enhancing and expanding the patient experience,
  3. Creating the best value for the work we do, and
  4. Improving the work life of those who deliver care.

Throughout the Transforming Care process, we are committed to:

  • Approaching our discussions and planning with a health equity and inclusion focus, remembering the barriers to accessing care that many of our patients face
  • Reaching consensus on decisions, prioritizing our patients’ safety, their quality of care, and access to services
  • Reaching consensus on decisions, prioritizing our patients’ safety, their quality of care, and access to services
  • Valuing and seeking ideas and input from SHN staff and Scarborough community members
  • Being transparent in our deliberations and open about how we make choices and decisions
  • Being courageous in our acts, inclusive in our hearts, compassionate to those around us, and innovative in our thinking
Services in Review

Services in Review

We have been reviewing and planning services for 12 clinical programs at SHN, as well as one clinical support program, and coming up with recommendations.

  • Establish dedicated areas and trained staff for patients with mental health and addictions diagnoses.
  • Extend geriatric emergency management (GEM) and Social Worker role/supports in the ED to support our senior patients.
  • Develop a SHN urgent primary care clinic for patients without family physicians.
  • Create an Urgent Care center.

  • Create clinics to support the assessment and care of non-urgent patients.
  • Modernize the criteria for accessing rehabilitation across our network.

  • Make all Emergency Departments kid-friendly.
  • Grow transitional-aged youth mental health services (aged 18-25).
  • Expand specialized paediatric care for the most vulnerable children.

  • Modernize the palliative care program.
  • Establish a dedicated inpatient unit for palliative care.
  • Develop a seamless system of palliative care to ensure patients’ needs are met in the care setting of their choice when they leave the hospital.

  • Create a Stroke Centre of Excellence at the Birchmount hospital.
  • Create a structural heart disease clinic to support the expansion of the regional cardiology program.

  • Establish a Metabolic and Chronic Disease Clinic with a world-class approach to obesity, diabetes and renal failure.
  • Continue implementation of the Shared Care (patient self-management) model.
  • Continue construction and planning of the:
    • 27 permanent in-centre hemodialysis units at Centenary hospital
    • Centre of Excellence for Chronic Disease Prevention and Management
    • Bridletowne Neighbourhood Centre (BNC)

  • Establish a Critical Care Response Team at the Centenary hospital.
  • Create a plan to move patients outside of the intensive care unit to a more comfortable environment when they require a lower level of care.
  • Implement a patient early warning score (i.e. NEWS) system to monitor and identify critically ill patients.

  • Establish Sport Medicine programming in collaboration with the Pan Am’s Sport Center and Lakeridge Health.
  • Develop dedicated daytime orthopedic trauma at the General hospital.
  • Adopt Enhanced Recovery after Surgery (ERAS).

  • Establish a rapid access program to support coordinated, timely diagnosis for suspected cancer patients.
  • Design a Scarborough central intake model for a simplified, standardized referral process.
  • Develop SHN’s Survivorship Program to better meet patients’ needs during and following treatment, with a focus on rehabilitation and transition back to the community.

  • Develop a centralized patient intake process.
  • Develop a crisis unit to support emergency department mental health patients.
  • Be the first hospital in Ontario to implement measurement-based mental health care.
  • Create and implement a Scarborough Addictions Strategy.
  • Expand mental health and addictions services to vulnerable populations, including seniors, youth, and diverse cultural communities.

  • Create a Seniors Health Program at SHN.
  • Support seniors during their hospital journey by recognizing their specific health, psychological and environmental needs.
  • Create a dedicated space to support seniors care in the emergency departments.

  • Strengthen partnerships between SHN and primary care practitioners.
  • Support the implementation of the Seamless Care Optimizing Patient Experience (SCOPE) program to facilitate integration with the hospital, engaging SHN specialists to enhance access for family physicians.
  • Establish an innovation hub for global health, diversity and health equity.
  • Be an active member of the Palliative Care Community Team in a palliative care system that meets needs of families and community family physicians.

Pharmacy

  • Enhance current sterile compounding and storage capacity in line with new NAPRA standards
  • Rollout replacement Automated Dispensing Units across all units in line with new standards
  • Create a centralized production centre at the Centenary site

Diagnostic Imaging

  • Explore options to increase capacity and access to interventional radiology at the General hospital
  • Increase CT capacity at the Birchmount hospital
  • Develop a clear process for sharing urgent results
  • ·Implement AI-supported diagnosis

Laboratory

  • Sustain point of care testing
  • Support service changes in line with CSG plans
  • Collaborate with regional laboratory partners to build regional partnerships/laboratory models to ensure sustainable high quality laboratory services
  • Invest in digital systems to standardize reporting and rounding

We know how important it is for babies and children to get a strong start in life. That is why last fall we got a head start on clinical services planning with our Women and Children’s program. This included obstetrics and some paediatric services.

Doctors, midwives, nurses, patients, and families studied options, consulted with experts, and received advice, ideas, and suggestions from hundreds of community members about how to provide the best possible care for Scarborough’s women and children.

With this change, SHN is re-imagining how we deliver our Women and Children’s program. It will allow our team to strengthen their skills and increase their expertise in caring for women with high-risk pregnancies, and newborns and children with complex and specialized needs.

We also created a new Stroke Centre of Excellence that is now located at our Birchmount hospital.

We know that being able to access specialized care right here in Scarborough is important for our patients and families — which is why the development of a new Stroke Centre of Excellence is such good news for our health network and community.

For the first time, the Scarborough community has access to a seamless stroke care service, close to home.