Living the spirit of the season

While the spirit of care and compassion takes the spotlight every holiday season, we’re grateful and proud that the spirit lives year round at Kingston Health Sciences Centre (KHSC).  This past year was no different.

This spirit infused Transforming care, together, our first strategic plan for KHSC. Launched in October, it’s a bold blueprint for the next five years, a commitment to our mission of caring for patients, families and each other and to the values that guide us always:  compassion, respect, partnership, excellence and innovation.   We encourage you to read the full plan here to learn more about our roadmap to becoming the world-class health care, research and teaching centre that our patients and families deserve.

A strong spirit of care and compassion also translated into clinical innovations and successes in 2018. 

Our living kidney donor program, powerfully caught this year in words and photographs, continued to thrive and has now benefitted the lives of more than 20 living kidney donors, recipients and families in our region.  

We also piloted new ways of providing care to patients as they transitioned back into the community, we built new partnerships with community health care agencies to address the opioid crisis in our region, and we implemented new processes for dramatically improving patient flow. In February, KHSC climbed the provincial rankings for wait times, scoring the most improved wait times for getting admitted patients to a bed.

For the eighth time, we were named one of the Top 40 research hospitals in Canada, recognition of our drive to shape the treatment options available to patients in the future. For evidence of that spirit of caring—of wanting to do more for our patients and doing it better—read about the research of trauma specialist Dr. Chris Evans, who is now shining the light on the effects of trauma that remain well after the broken bones and scar tissue have healed.

And we had a clear measure of just how expertly we provide care when Accreditation Canada conducted a five-day site visit in April and reported that KHSC had achieved a 97.7 per cent compliance rate with almost 3,000 applicable criteria for nationally set standards of excellence at every level of our organization. 

We’re grateful for our many blessings at KHSC, most especially for the hard work, dedication and professionalism of our staff, physicians, volunteers and learners. They know the true meaning of the season of care and compassion because they embody that spirit every day of the year.

We encourage you to count your own blessings during this holiday season. And we wish you and your loved ones much health and happiness in the coming year.

David O’Toole
Chair, Board of Directors

Dr. David Pichora
President & CEO