SUSTAINABILITY
As a key pillar of our strategic plan, sustainability calls on all of us to be responsible users of our organization’s and community’s resources. This includes reducing our environmental footprint, being good stewards of our financial resources, and planning for the future so that we can anticipate and meet the needs of our growing region for generations to come.
Every day our teams provide care for thousands of people who have immediate health care needs. While we work to respond to the needs of our community today, we must also plan for the needs of tomorrow. This year we made significant progress on several major projects to expand and modernize our sites and services so that we can provide high quality care for the people who needs us today as well as five, ten, and twenty years from now.
In partnership with the provincial government, Hamilton Health Sciences is on a journey to build a healthier future for our region by replacing our oldest hospital buildings with modern facilities designed to support the health care of today and tomorrow. This includes:
The West Lincoln Memorial Hospital redevelopment project in Grimsby is currently in the construction phase. Crews broke ground on the new hospital in 2022, which is being built directly behind the existing building to provide continuity for patient care during construction. In 2023-24 the new hospital quickly took shape and is set to open in 2025.
The redevelopment of the aging parts of our Juravinski Hospital (JH) on Hamilton Mountain is the single-largest health infrastructure investment in our organization’s history and will also make JH the largest acute inpatient hospital in our region. We continue to work with our provincial and municipal government partners to advance planning for this project. Construction is targeted to start in 2028 and will take approximately a decade to complete.
In 2023-24 McMaster Children’s Hospital (MCH) received over $48 million from the provincial government to expand pediatric services so that we can care for more kids in our region. This investment – the largest in MCH’s history – has supported the growth of 24 services and is already leading to reduced wait times across several services including surgeries and procedures, diagnostic imaging, mental health treatment, and child development and rehabilitation. This investment was part of a historic $330M provincial investment in pediatric health care across Ontario.
Beyond bricks and mortar, we’re always working to remain responsive to the ever-evolving health care needs of our community and region. This includes embracing innovative approaches to care, such as:
We expanded our hospitalist program at Juravinski Hospital to help streamline patient care. Hospitalists, specializing in internal or family medicine, provide direct care from admission to discharge, ensuring workflow efficiency and continuity of care. Hamilton Health Sciences boasts one of Canada’s few comprehensive hospitalist programs.
HHS staff and physicians continue to care for 120 non-acute patients in our Satellite Health Facility, housed within a converted historic hotel, while they await discharge to a community setting. This preserves hospital beds for patients with the most urgent needs in the midst of ongoing bed shortages in post-discharge destinations, such as long-term care facilities.
Given that hospitals are a significant contributor to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and waste production in Canada, we have an obligation to reduce our environmental impact which, in turn, supports the health of people living across our community and region.
We are reducing emissions, diverting waste, and optimizing energy consumption across our sites and have a plan to reach Net Zero carbon emissions by 2050. Creating an Environmental Management Plan is a priority within our 2024 Strategic Plan.
View a snapshot of our environmental performance in 2023-24, or scroll down to learn more.
We have an ambitious goal to achieve Net Zero carbon emissions by 2050. At HHS, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are primarily created by burning natural gas to generate electricity (cogeneration). In the last three years we’ve invested $57-million to upgrade to more efficient cogeneration infrastructure. Combined with a new strategy of how and when cogeneration is used, we’ve significantly reduced our GHG emissions by half, one year ahead of our goal.
Amidst a significant rise in the number of patients we treat each day, we’ve drastically reduced the volume of waste we send to landfill. This includes paper, food, surgical, and pharmaceutical waste, much of which is recycled or reprocessed to be used again, safely. Overall, we generate 50% less waste each day (by volume) compared to our peers.
We’ve long invested in creating green space across our sites to support patient and workforce wellness, as well as to contribute to the wellbeing of our local environment. In 2023-24, after a pause due to the pandemic, we resumed operation of our community vegetable garden at our Hamilton General Hospital site, which generates produce for local food banks. We also partnered with Trees for Health Ontario to plant many new trees at HGH and St. Peter’s Hospital.
As a hospital, our community and funding partners entrust us with funds to ensure the delivery of high quality, efficient care and service. Despite ever-increasing demands for hospital care in our region, we continue to find innovative ways to reduce costs while growing our workforce and maintaining the highest standard of care. We’ve also realized more benefits resulting from some of our major investments, including implementation our new hospital information system, Epic, such as increased patient safety and reduced operational costs.
