Better together: How UHN and West Park will improve health care across the city – and beyond

Patients who have gone through life-altering illnesses, such as limb amputations, stroke, respiratory and age-related conditions, are able to find the unique care they need at West Park Healthcare Centre to help them return back to their lives.

Now working together, the teams at West Park and UHN’s family of sites – including Toronto General Hospital, Toronto Western Hospital and Toronto Rehabilitation Institute – have big plans on the horizon. Not only to make a smoother road to recovery, but to provide patients with care like never before.

UHN Foundation sat down with Dr. Bikramjit Dhillon, Medical Site Director of West Park Healthcare Centre, to hear about the unique services that West Park provides, and how this care could grow in the future.

Dr. Dhillon: West Park is a very unique place for UHN’s patients. We provide rehabilitation programming for a number of areas, such as amputations, musculoskeletal, geriatric, respiratory, stroke and neurological-related conditions. We also take care of patients who are in need of highly specialized care, such as long-term ventilation.

At West Park, we have a lot of things to be proud of. Our campus currently houses the largest and longest operating lung rehabilitation program in Canada, as well as the largest in-patient amputation rehab program. Something really cool we have is our own prosthetics department, where we make prosthetics for patients following surgery. We are the only Greater Toronto Area (GTA) adult rehab program which is able to develop prosthetics in-house!

I was excited! UHN is a nationally and internationally recognized leader in many areas of patient care, research and education. This is shown through Newsweek’s recent ranking of UHN as the second-best hospital in the world.

While UHN and West Park have programs which focus on similar areas of care, we specialize in different things – think of it like the different sides of a pyramid, where each side is just a part of the overall structure. For West Park to not only join such a powerhouse in Canadian healthcare, but to contribute to improving future patient care at a provincial and national level – it’s an exciting time.

You can think of the patient journey like a series of mountains, where each peak represents a milestone in their treatment. So, for an amputee patient, they may have a consultation, surgery, recovery, rehabilitation and prosthetic fitting. UHN has already built a few bridges to make the movement between some of these mountains much easier. And so has West Park.

This amalgamation will now allow us to build even more bridges within our newly unified network, so that the entire process is even smoother. Where a patient who requires an amputation will be able to seamlessly move from their initial appointment to a prosthetic fitting, all within the same hospital system.

And not only that! Because we now are all working together, we can better understand how an earlier decision can impact a patient’s outcome down the road, allowing us to make improvements with their entire journey in perspective. It’s truly a remarkable opportunity.

Clinician and staff training is one area that patients might not think about a lot – whether the person who is providing their care is knowledgeable, not only in their area of practice, but do they also understand how the care they provide will impact the next stage of recovery? And this can be on a scale, so the more a provider has been exposed to patients in other stages of care, the more informed they will be about what they need to provide.

For example, respiratory therapy students would have access to our large patient population, as well as the unique environment and expertise of West Park and UHN staff more broadly. This would allow them to have a more immersive educational experience, providing them with a more comprehensive education on how to care for these individuals, ultimately allowing them to provide better care to future patients.

Also, research! Research has always been a critical priority for both UHN and West Park. It can not only help us to better understand how the body functions and recovers from an illness or injury or following surgery, but it can also inform us on how to better care for our patients. Combining West Park’s large number of patients and experienced staff with scientists at KITE, the Research Institute at UHN Rehab, we will soon be able to answer questions we couldn’t before. This is a remarkable moment, not just for West Park and UHN, but patients who are in need of our care.

Thank you!