Partnering for Success

There’s an old saying in real estate: “location is everything.” At the Faculty of Medicine, that’s true too. Our location puts us at the heart of some of the major players in health care in Ontario. We’re right across the street from Queen’s Park, where the laws and regulations governing health care and education are made. We’re a few blocks away from Bay Street, where investors are always looking for new ideas to bring to market.  And we’re right up the street from some of the major hospitals in the Toronto Academic Health Science Network (TAHSN), which is made up of U of T and our nine fully affiliated hospitals and four associate members.

Our TAHSN partners provide a home for many of our activities in health and biomedical research and education. We, in turn, supply TAHSN hospitals with the people and the expertise they need to deliver better health care for the people of Ontario.

I recently spoke with the CEOs of other TASHN institutions and I want to share with you what I shared with them: our vision for how our Faculty can be a stronger partner — not only to TAHSN, but to all the partners that geography has favoured us with.

In my presentation, I quoted something U of T President Meric Gertler said at our Faculty’s April 2014 strategic retreat:

“The University of Toronto’s ability to excel at partnerships has helped define this institution for nearly 200 years. The successful collaboration with our partner hospitals to create the Toronto Academic Health Science Network and, more recently, its extension throughout the Toronto Region among our community-affiliates, is nothing less than remarkable. We have achieved international recognition among the best academic health science centres in the world.”

I couldn’t agree more. TAHSN is the jewel in our partnership crown and the power of this relationship is enormous. One great example of this is the Medical Psychiatry Alliance, which brings together The Hospital for Sick Children, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Trillium Health Partners and U of T. Each partner helps care for those suffering from mental and physical illness in a unique way. Right now, this is a gap in our health care system that none of us could tackle alone. By working together, though, we are able to narrow — or even close — that gap.

Looking beyond Toronto, we also need to be a partner for other universities. Our faculty, students and staff lead more than 100 global health initiatives that include capacity building, education and research sectors. Members of our community learn and grow through institutional agreements with international partners around the world, and our faculty co-published close to 27,000 papers last year with peers in every corner of the world.

One example of the kind of role we can play is T-HOPE (Toronto Health Organization Performance Evaluation), which is led by Onil Bhattacharyya, an Associate Professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine. T-HOPE is a U of T research group that includes medical residents from the Department of Family and Community Medicine and MBA students from the Rotman School of Management. T-HOPE finds new ways to address global health challenges.

Finally, we also have to be a partner for government — particularly the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care. Our people can play an important role in helping to create and promote sound public policy — and I’d like to see us used as a resource to government. After all, we can bring our whole network, with its remarkable depth, to provide solutions to the daunting problems facing health care today.

The last thing I mentioned to our TAHSN partners is that, while we are proud of our Faculty’s accomplishments, we’re not going to be complacent. We’ll work with our partners to optimize technology, prepare for a changed work environment, expand our courses and make sure that the quality of our research matches its quantity. Like President Gertler said: partnerships have defined our success for the past 200 years.  The job we face today is making sure our partnerships continue to strengthen our Faculty well into the future.

Trevor Young
Dean, Faculty of Medicine
Vice-Provost, Relations with Health Care Institutions