North York General wins patient safety and quality improvement award
Award recognizes hospital’s efforts to improve patient flow
Thursday October 23, 2008 -- Jason Thompson
North York General Hospital has been named the winner of the 2008 Canadian Healthcare Excellence in Quality Award (CHEQA) for its efforts to improve patient flow and reduce wait times throughout the continuum of care.

“It’s very exciting for us to be recognized for the work that we’re doing around patient flow,” says Karyn Popovich, program director, medicine at North York General Hospital, a Healthcare Insurance Reciprocal of Canada subscriber.

When officials at North York General gathered to devise a method of improving patient flow and reducing wait times, Popovich says they realized that it isn’t practical to make improvements in one area of an organization and that those efforts must span the continuum of care.

With that approach in mind, the focus of the project became to identify process improvements at entry points into the hospital, points of care throughout the hospital and finally at discharge.

“We’ve done a lot of work over the past couple of years on this,” Popovich says. “Its tough work with all the challenges we’re facing in the system so we have to continuously work at improving patient flow.”

In order to identify process improvement, North York General employed what is known as lean methodology, which is a philosophy that looks for improvement by removing waste in the system. In this case, the waste is time spent waiting for care.

Popovich says engagement with front-line workers was essential to improving patient flow.

“It wasn’t a top-down project where we told people what to do — we used the collective wisdom of our front-line people to tell us how we can make improvements, take the waste out of the system and improve the quality of care,” she says, adding this approach resulted in greater buy-in from staff because they feel their ideas are valued.

North York General Hospital’s patient flow project was one of five finalists for CHEQA, Canada's premiere healthcare award recognizing excellence in quality of care and patient safety.

The award, including a $15,000 cash prize will be presented at the Halifax 8 Symposium in Winnipeg Oct. 23 to 27.

Click here for more information on CHEQA and the other finalists.

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