Each year Sunnybrook cares for more than 1.2 million people and that number is growing. In fact, the demand for care has outpaced our physical space and our allotted funding. We simply don’t have the room or the funding to care for everyone who wants to be seen at Sunnybrook.

For example in 2006, we saw about 40,000 patients in our ED. Last year, that number jumped to 61,000. In just over 10-years, we have seen a dramatic increase in need but not an increase in the number of available in-patient beds, which in fact have decreased in the same timeframe.

Hospital funding in Ontario is a complex formula that takes into consideration criteria such as the level of care required for a patient and the amount of time the person may spend in hospital. Each year the hospital spends about $900 million to operate its facilities and care for 1.2 million patients. Although that’s a large amount of money, the actual costs of running the hospital exceed what we receive each year in revenue, which forces Sunnybrook to find savings of about $20 million every year to achieve a balanced budget. To achieve its vision, the hospital also relies heavily on the philanthropic support of its community and partnerships with private enterprise and government. Whatever strategic decisions the hospital makes, they have to consider the ongoing financial health of the organization.

Sunnybrook is a research-intensive hospital. Each year, we conduct more than $100 million in research that spans the spectrum from early thoughts and ideas that are explored in a lab to large studies that look at the health and wellbeing of populations of people. Through this strategic plan we are looking at how our research agenda will be defined for the next three years to address some of the most challenging issues facing our health care system. For example, through this plan, we are working to create a strategy to develop ‘personalized’ approaches to medicine that use medical imaging technologies (MRI, ultrasound, etc.) to determine success factors for treatment.

The hospital exists in a defined community or catchment area. However, many of our programs and services provide care that is unavailable in communities across the province, so the hospital is an Ontario-wide resource for patients who for example may have a major burn injury.

As a result, Sunnybrook provides less complex care for residents within the defined neighbourhood catchment area. The reasoning for this is to encourage people to access more straight-forward care at a hospital closer to home. However, for those people with difficult health issues, we serve the entire province. Balancing these responsibilities can be a challenge when people want to access Sunnybrook for care they can receive closer to their home.