In today’s health care landscape, patients are frequently grappling with complex medical conditions which require extensive care, diagnosis of challenging symptoms, or management of multiple organ-related conditions. For these patients, UHN’s Internal Medicine (IM) physicians provide comprehensive co-ordinated care, while also tackling a range of issues in our ever-changing health landscape. They often treat the sickest patients, when the need is urgent and with no textbook or rule to guide them.

The IM service is responsible for over 50 per cent of all patients hospitalized at UHN, and the vast majority of IM cases are unplanned care, such as emergency room visits or the results of 911 calls. IM patient wards are located at both Toronto General Hospital and Toronto Western Hospital and are the largest inpatient units at UHN. These wards are also the home to Clinical Teaching Units, where Faculty physicians provide foundational training in all aspects of internal medicine. This ensures that medical students, residents, fellows and members of multidisciplinary health care teams are skilled at caring for the whole patient with the utmost compassion and humanistic approach.

UHN’s IM team shines when treating the sickest and most complex patients – they are specialist physicians who understand complexity, acuity, chronicity and patient-centred care better than anyone. Specialists throughout the hospital look to IM doctors for their wide breadth of knowledge and expert assistance for the most complex patients – for example, those who do not yet have a unifying diagnosis for multiple seemingly-unrelated symptoms, or for those with challenging multi-organ diseases beyond the scope of one medical specialty.