It is our pleasure to welcome you to our first entirely online annual report. We thank you for your interest in our hospital. It has been a tremendous year for us, and with this annual report, you have the opportunity to learn about our successes in 2011.

This has been a year of important openings and achievements. We would not be where we are today without the commitment and dedication of our staff, physicians, volunteers, our senior management team and our Board of Directors. In the last year Rouge Valley’s team has focused on improving services to our patients and positioning the hospital for the future.

Highlights of the year

Rouge Valley Ajax and Pickering redevelopment

In February, we celebrated the official opening of the major redevelopment of our Rouge Valley Ajax and Pickering hospital campus. Inside the 70,000 square feet of new space, plus the 70,000 square feet of renovations, is our new emergency department, complex continuing care unit, diagnostic services and much more.

We thank our patients, their families and our team for putting up with the noise and inconvenience that go with such a major renovation project, but we think we can all agree the end product was worth it.

Fast-track emergency cardiac care

During the year, our cardiac care team celebrated a significant new service for the community, enhancing our growing reputation as a centre of excellence in this area. In the spring, we marked the one-year anniversary of our new Code STEMI initiative. This fast-track cardiac care program facilitates certain patients who are having a heart attack to come in to our hospital via ambulance, bypass our emergency department and go straight to our catheterization unit for treatment. This results in patients being treated within a crucial 90-minute window, from pick up by the ambulance to our catheterization unit, greatly improving survival and recovery.

Congratulations to the entire cardiac care team. We also recognize, and thank, our health care partners for making this faster cardiac service available to the community. Those partners are: Toronto Emergency Medical Services; Durham Region Emergency Medical Services; Lakeridge Health; The Scarborough Hospital; and the Central East Local Health Integration Network (CE LHIN).

New strategic plan

Our new Strategic Plan On-A-Page was approved in February by the Board.

This plan was developed through a robust set of community and internal consultations. True to its name, it is a concise plan that sets out a clear path to make RVHS an exceptional, quality-focused, community acute care hospital for our patients - a hospital that is focused on the patient and family experience.

We intend to provide every patient and their families with the best experience possible given the circumstances and reasons they are visiting us.

Developed new three-year Operational Sustainment and Capital Plan

On March 31, we also successfully completed the deficit elimination plan, developed in 2008 to address the historic operational financial issues of RVHS. This plan was completed well ahead of target. When we first introduced the deficit elimination plan, it’s fair to say there were many who doubted we would succeed at improving the quality of our care, in maintaining and increasing patient services and volumes, while spending less doing so. Success took relentless action by management, staff and physicians at Rouge Valley Ajax and Pickering and at Rouge Valley Centenary.

Thanks to the success of our deficit elimination plan, we have earned surpluses in each of the last three years, rebuilt our working capital, invested the cash generated by surpluses in new equipment and facility refurbishment to the tune of $36.1 million in the last three years. We have also improved the quality of care we have delivered and have grown patient volumes particularly in our emergency departments, where we anticipate seeing almost 120,000 patients this year – a growth of 26 per cent since 2007. We have also increased surgical volumes and decreased surgical wait times as well as our ED wait times.

Our operational sustainment plan for the next  three years shows us continuing to generate surpluses of about 1.5 per cent of revenues and continuing to rebuild our working capital and invest in equipment and facility refurbishment. We anticipate based on this three-year plan to invest nearly $40 million in capital over the next three years. We would not be able to do this, were it not for the vision, planning and fortitude of our team to take action as we did starting early in 2008.

Improved patient experience

Let me give you a few examples of some of the many achievements our patients have experienced during the last year, thanks to the teamwork of staff and physicians at our two hospital campuses:

• Patients spend less time waiting for care in our emergency departments;
• Nurses spend more time caring for patients as a result of having more organized work areas;
• Our hospital beds are also better utilized with less time between patients, meaning people needing our care are getting it more quickly;
• We’ve improved patient discharge planning, meaning people go home to their families as soon as they are ready;
• Not only do our patients go home sooner, they also don’t need to be re-admitted as much as in the past;
• Patients wait less time to be transferred from ambulance care to our emergency department;
• There are virtually no canceled surgeries in our hospital now because we screen patients more effectively, making sure they are fit for their procedure. This benefits the patients and the hospital by making the best use of our resources everyday;
• Sometimes the improvements are slight, but impactful. For example, our team of doctors, nurses, allied health and all staff has improved communication with patients and their families by posting information boards in patient rooms on our medical and surgical units;
• Patients and doctors now receive lab tests and diagnostic imaging results faster—in hours rather than days; and
• Our staff has reduced the paperwork for patients seeking placement in long-term care facilities. Over the next three years we will focus more and more on improving our patient and family experience when they come to us. We will improve signage, accessibility, how our facilities look, the equipment that our teams use, and perhaps most importantly how we treat you from an experience perspective, not just a technical quality perspective. We won’t get it right every time but we will try to!

Our approach to making your experience with us the best will be driven through the implementation of our Patient Declaration of Values.

Patient Declaration of Values

In the final quarter of fiscal year 2010-11, RVHS began work on our Patient Declaration of Values. This document was finalized by the end of the fiscal year, and subsequently approved by our Board in the spring of 2011.

Our Patient Declaration of Values, whose development was led by our Community Advisory Group, comes directly from consultations with our patients, community members, and our staff, physicians and volunteers. The values our declaration espouses takes to heart the significance of putting patients first—a theme which is driving the ongoing transformation of RVHS.

Lean management philosophy

We continue to achieve these successes through teamwork using Lean, which is a management philosophy stemming from a Japanese approach to constant quality improvement. At Rouge Valley, we have embraced the Lean philosophy so we can become even more effective. By applying the Lean approach, our doctors, nurses and staff gather in small groups to tackle our challenges, solve problems and deal with specific issues to improve patient care.

Rouge Valley has become so effective at implementing Lean that our staff—senior team members and managers — are often asked to speak at conferences on how to apply Lean to improve patient care and team engagement.

Closing

In closing, we would like to underline our thanks and that of the Board to the CE LHIN, our elected leaders at the municipal, provincial and federal levels, and all of our health care partners for the continued support and collaboration. Together, we are delivering excellent quality health care to our communities.

And we would also like to thank all of the Rouge Valley staff, physicians and volunteers who work so hard to ensure that Rouge Valley can achieve the vision of being the best at what we do.