Toronto's first child hospice part of the Don Jail lands redevelopment

When its Toronto's first paediatric hospice, 6 beds in an old mansion is a good start. Plans for Toronto's first hospice and respite centre for complex palliative children and teens will be presented Thursday. The expansion of the Governor's Mansion and revitalization of Gerrard and Broadview as a "unique campus of care" in Riverdale includes:

The new Bridgepoint Hospital – A state-of-the-art facility that has been designed to meet the specialized care needs of people with complex chronic disease (multiple lifelong illnesses) and disability.

The Bridgepoint Collaboratory for Research and Innovation – The new Hospital will bring together world-class clinical, education, and research talent. Together, they will identify new and innovative ways of preventing and managing complex chronic disease.

The Bridgepoint Family Health Team – Provides primary care services to people in the Riverdale community and across the Greater Toronto Area. Using an innovative model of care, family doctors, nurse practitioners, registered nurses, social workers and pharmacists work in partnership with patients.

The Bridgepoint Health Foundation – Supports the mission of Bridgepoint Health through charitable giving and community partnerships. Generous donors make it possible to develop new and enhanced patient care programs, create advanced training opportunities for the next generation of health care providers and undertake research to improve the prevention and management of complex chronic disease.

The focus on complex chronic care, linking of hospital and researchers, as well as the creation of an interdisciplinary family health team for a specific area of the city is very exciting. SickKids recently setup The Norman Saunders Complex Care Initiative which intensively supports a small, growing group of children with particularly complex health needs. In December 2009, three months after Bridgepoint raised over $400 million in bonds, SickKids launched a $200 million dollar unsecured debenture for their proposed Research Tower on nearby Bay St.

Anyone know if Bridgepoint is intended to become an alternative destination to SickKids for some of Canada's most complex care kids?

Dr Steven Schwartz of SickKids CCCU appointed new cardiovascular chair

Congratulations to Dr Steven Schwartz on his appointment as inaugural holder of The Norine Rose Chair in Cardiovascular Sciences. Dr Schwartz started at SickKids while Sasha was in CCCU and I first met him as he visited all the bedsides and introduced himself to families on the unit. Though he was not on Sasha's care team I have talked with Dr Schwartz several times about communication between staff and families in the ICU. So it was very encouraging to see him champion a new communication training module focused on resolving staff-family confrontation and the Sasha Bella Fund supported the launch of the program. I hope this new role offers Dr Schwartz more resources to continue evolving patient and family supports and particularly to strike an interprofessional group that can work with parent volunteers who experienced care delivery in the cardiac and paediatric intensive care units. I think the Labatt Family Heart Centre will benefit greatly from an advisory and clearing-house for patient and family-centred concerns encompassing both the ICU and Floor 4.

Toronto Public Library responds to family concerns over SickKids Reading Room budget cuts

Further to the January 27 post on library cuts to SickKids Reading Room, Matthew Church responded to parent concerns in a letter cced to SickKids Childrens's Council:
"while we will be reducing our financial committment, we will continue to support library service at the hospital. We are currently examining several options to do this, including training support for hospital volunteers (for which HSC is so well regarded), regularly scheduled library programs at the hospital provided by library staff, the provision of a deposit collection and continued financial support for the Reading Room collection."
The full Toronto Public Library response identifies Anne Bailey, Director, Branch Librarys, as the contact for further information (abailey AT torontopubliclibrary.ca).Valerie McDonald responded:

Dear Mr. Church,

Thank you very much for your thoughtful reply to my concerns about the cuts to service at the Sick Kids reading room. I'm glad to hear that the library is committed to continuing to support the program with training for volunteers, a deposit collection and regularly scheduled programs by TPL staff. While I agree that Sick Kids has a very strong volunteer program, I don't believe that volunteers can ever replace the services of on-site, trained staff who have the expertise, experience and perspective to adjust programming to meet the changing needs of a very challenging population.  In addition, the proposed changes do not address my concern that the TDSB does not have a mandate to serve pre-school children in the way that TPL does.
Those very young children represent a very significant proportion of patients at Sick Kids. However, I do appreciate that you are faced with difficult financial constraints.

Sincerely,

Valerie McDonald 

2009 Project Database for Nursing Leadership Institute and Health Leaders Institute

The Nursing Leadership Institute & Health Leaders Institute 2009 Combined Project Database is an excellent resource listing hospital teams recently engaged in particular hospital and care research projects.

The database is organized into four sections: Care Delivery, Healthy Workplace, Business of Healthcare, and Personal/Professional/Team Development. The first section, Care Delivery, is further broken down into Models of Care, Care Pathways/Best Practices, Client/Patient-Centred Care, Introducing or Changing Clinical Program/Practice, Patient Flow, Community Development/Population Health.

If you put the following words into the PDF document search - Hospital for Sick Children, parent, palliative - here are some of the results. (staff, phone number ommitted and some typos corrected).

Family-centred developmentally supportive care mapping for infants and families in the NICU. Develop & implement a Family-Centred care map which incorporates best practice guidelines and system of evaluation, Hospital for Sick Children [project is supported by NICU's staff and parent Family Care Committee on which I participate]

Improving transitions for families with serious prenatal diagnoses to pediatric care. Document the transitions process of prenatally diagnosed infants from Mt Sinai to SickKids; Develop a tool for families to document & share experiences; Develop plan for disseminating info to providers. Hospital for Sick Children

Advance Care Planning (End of Life). Implement process hospital-wide for developing plans of care for children with life-threatening illness that reflect communication between healthcare professionals & families about wants, needs and desires for end of life care. Hospital for Sick Children

Addressing diversity in meeting child & family needs. Professional dev't program that addresses new standards of care; issues of RT diversity. Action focused program for interprofessional staff. Hospital for Sick Children

Opening the door to a natural death. Develop a reflective practice tool for health care professionals, addressing their values, attitudes and beliefs about end-of-life. Hamilton Health Sciences Centre

CCU Guidelines to support the delivery of quality end of life care. The development of guidelines to assist the team in providing quality end of life care to our ICU patients and their families. Guidelines may include withdrawal of care, family meetings, analgesia & sedation, organ & tissue donation. Guelph General Hospital

Engaging patients and families as part of the healthcare team. Developing guidelines for fully engaging patients and families as part of the healthcare team.
Riverview Health Centre

A tool to facilitate daily care of long-term hospitalized children in the CCU and PICU. The creation of a tool to facilitate consistent daily care for children who experiencelong-term hospitalization in the PICU & CCU. Hospital for Sick Children

Peer support for parents. Development of a parent peer support program. Hospital for Sick Children. [very happy to see this one and that I know all four of the practitioners on the list]

Taking care of those who care. Create an environment that provides coping resiliency for health care professionals, patients and parents at SickKids.
Hospital for Sick Children

Parental Presence during OR induction. A program that allows patients and the care-tiver to have/give support during induction in ALL surgeries. Hospital for Sick Children

Development of Palliative Care Unit. Transforming oncology / medicine unit of 30 beds by dividing unit into a medicine oncology unit and a palliative care unit.
Southlake Regional Health Centre

Family Centred Care (FCC) & Interprofessional Practice (IPP) Health Leadership Institute Evaluation Project. To evaluate through measurable outcomes, the impact of
participation in the HLI on advancing FCC & IPP. Hospital for Sick Children.

Implementation of a nurse led critical care response team (CCRT). Improved patient safety, quality, teamwork, and utilization of resources with a CCRT. Cambridge Memorial Hospital

I could go on listing exciting projects all day but I thinks these 14 items out of the 900 on the list convey what a useful document this is. This project database is also a great place to identify projects that need research championship; the keywords "error", "disclosure", "adverse event" do not produce any results although it is an important issue and the manner that disclosure happens and potential involvement of parents in error review is being researched.