Our strategy for Transforming care, together

As an integrated health sciences centre we have new and better opportunities to deliver care where and how it is needed most, to transform the patient experience and to improve the health of people across our region and beyond.

To develop the strategic directions outlined in this five-year plan, we took a close look at the environment in which we operate and the forces of change that are shaping our health care system. We examined the population health demographics of our region to better understand what health, cultural and social needs exist and how to provide responsive care. We also met with individual communities to learn about their specific health care needs and conducted in-depth conversations with more than 2,000 people from both within our organization and across our region to inform our work. This helped us understand how best to align our strengths, resources and capabilities with our collective aspiration to make our communities healthier while transforming our health care system.

Where we are today

Southeastern Ontario is home to a rapidly aging population with growing rates of chronic diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular and heart diseases. Unlike in more urban regions of Ontario, the 500,000 members of our community are spread out over a large geographic and mostly rural area, which can make access to care challenging.  

However, these challenges can also be opportunities. We know that many of our patients do not travel outside of the Southeast region for care. As a top research facility brimming with inquisitive minds, we have the capacity to take a close look at our unique health demographics and to identify long-term solutions to address the health issues we see here in our communities. Our large rural population also forces us to think creatively about partnering with other providers to make care more available in the community and about how to make it easier to access that care.

As stewards of public dollars, we are constantly looking for new ways to ensure that our care remains affordable and sustainable within the funding provided to us as an academic hospital. At the same time, we must invest in our spaces and keep pace with technology in order to maintain our high standards of care and facilitate better flow of information for enhanced safety, convenience and coordination. This requires us to use our dollars wisely and to maintain trust with donors who support our hospital through the University Hospitals Kingston Foundation.

We asked people to share their observations about what we were already doing well and where we had room to progress with respect to delivering better care and promoting better health at the best value, all while fostering joy in our work.

What we heard from our community

We undertook a robust engagement process over the course of a full year to help us shape our future.  We held numerous conversations with people who work, learn and volunteer at KHSC through all-staff open forums, physician forums and conversations with teams across our hospital sites. As a newly integrated health sciences centre, we began with the exciting work of crafting our mission and values together. We also sought input on a longer-term vision for KHSC’s future. We then shifted the conversation to include our community, health, social services and education partners as we began to consider proposed strategic directions. Using the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s (IHI) Quadruple Aim as a framework, we asked people to share their observations about what we were already doing well and where we had room to progress with respect to delivering better care and promoting better health at the best value, all while fostering joy in our work.

We received a lot of valuable feedback. We heard from people at KHSC about what will help them feel joy in their work and support their wellness. We heard from our partners about how we can best meet patients’ needs together. We heard that we have opportunities to change our practices to better coordinate with other providers in the health care system to ensure quality experiences at every step of a patient’s health care journey. We heard about ways through which we can provide better and more collaborative education for our learners, who are the health care providers of tomorrow. We heard strong support for KHSC seizing opportunities to create a more seamless, integrated health care system for the people of southeastern Ontario.

Take a look into our engagement sessions and see what we learned to help inform our strategic plan:

Our strategy development process included a detailed environmental scan, an analysis of population health demographics, a close look at our organization’s current performance, and hundreds of conversations with stakeholders about the future of KHSC. It’s fair to say we learned a lot. To make sense of it all, we used a SOAR analysis to help us prioritize what we learned and choose what to act on in our strategic directions for the future so that we can leverage our existing strengths and capitalize on opportunities in our environment as we move toward our aspirations for the future and the results we want to achieve. 

Here are some of the items that we must remember when thinking about the future of the organization:

KHSC is a brand new academic health sciences centre that builds on our proud traditions as Hotel Dieu Hospital and Kingston General Hospital, with legacies spanning back over 150 years. Our first planning process provided the exciting opportunity for us to engage with our KHSC community to help to define our purpose, our shared values and our desired future state for KHSC. Read on to learn about our mission, vision and values, or to hear from our people about the future of KHSC, click here.

Each care journey can be defined by a series of actions, moments or breakthroughs.

Everyday actions are all about the little things we do to make a difference, like stopping to provide directions in the hallway or taking the time to provide words of support to a worried family. Significant moments are hard to forget – here, that can mean receiving a new diagnosis, welcoming a new baby into your family, or walking on your own for the first time after a hip replacement. Exciting breakthroughs can be life-changing events or being on the team that performed the first surgery of its kind in Canada. The impact of these advances can ripple through entire communities, in southeastern Ontario and beyond. At KHSC, it’s our mission to support our patients, families and each other throughout everyone’s individual and unique journey.  

Legacy mission statements
KHSC is built on the foundation of two proud hospitals – Hotel Dieu Hospital and Kingston General Hospital. To read more about our legacy sites, click here.

KHSC aims to play a role in transforming our health care system. We can’t do this alone. Strengthening our partnerships, developing a robust quality roadmap, embracing innovation, making groundbreaking discoveries in research, and training the care providers of tomorrow will all contribute to improving the health of the communities and region we serve. With our collective expertise, we can serve as a model for health system transformation.

At the heart of our values is compassion. We care for some of the sickest and most vulnerable people in our communities. We treat each person with respect and dignity. We do this by caring for the whole person, when and where they need it most. Partnership is at the core of how we work. We empower patients, families and our teams to do great work together, and with our communities. The pursuit of excellence drives everything we do. We will be good stewards of resources while continually enhancing the quality of care, research and education we provide. Research and innovation reflect our courage to try new things, challenge what we know, create new knowledge and transform health care.

As we transform care together, quality, innovation and partnership will show up as foundations to all that we do. They will be evident not just in the care environment we provide to patients and families, but also in our leadership, partnership with patients, culture and in the outcomes we achieve with our patients. Our approach to innovation will be driven by our quality agenda, and our ‘people plans’ will equip everyone in the organization with the language and tools to improve quality every day. Our first strategic plan sets Kingston Health Sciences Centre on a course to go beyond the individual strengths of its legacy hospital sites to create a bold new future that will see our communities become healthier and our health care system transform.

So what’s next? Every year, we create an Annual Corporate Plan that aligns our annual goals to our strategic directions and creates focus across the organization. This helps us to plan the work that we must complete to achieve our goals and allows us to create measurable outcomes so that we can track our success as we progress through each year of the strategy.

To read the latest Annual Corporate Plan as part of this strategy, click here.

To download a copy of our strategic directions, click here:

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