Critical Care Strategy
About the Critical Care Strategy
Transforming critical care service delivery is integral to keeping Ontarians healthy, ensuring better access to care, reduced wait times for services, and providing an environment within which all healthcare practitioners can deliver their best.
The Critical Care Strategy is based on the recommendations outlined in the Ontario Critical Care Steering Committee Final Report and organized into a highly integrated 7-part program. Together, these programs enable and enhance accountability, empowerment, and coordination at the hospital, LHIN and provincial levels to support new and ongoing improvements to critical care access, quality and system integration.
The Critical Care Strategy will :
- Establish a province-wide system for critical care performance measurement and quality improvement;
- Improve on the degree of standardization of best practices and critical care training across Ontario;
- Increase efficient and effective delivery of critical care services via operational management processes, and surge capacity response planning, development, and coordination at the LHIN level; and
- Flatten the demand curve, mitigating, as far as possible, the need for increased capacity investments and provide clarity where investment is required.
The implementation of the seven initiatives below will help the provincial government improve the delivery of critical care in Ontario.
|Critical Care Information System||
Enable evidence-based decision-making to support system-wide capacity planning and targeted performance improvement initiatives through data collection, analysis and reporting.
|Critical Care Response Teams||
Bring critical care expertise out of the ICU to patients throughout the hospital 24/7 to improve patient outcomes and efficiency of resource utilization.
|System-Level Training Initiatives||
Expand the skill and capacity of existing Critical Care Health Professionals, enhancing pre-and post-ICU care, and supporting surge capacity response plans.
|Performance Improvement Collaborative||
Employ innovative approaches to achieve quality benchmarks defined at the hospital, LHIN and provincial level, and cultivate a culture of ongoing accountability and performance improvement in critical care service delivery.
|Ethical Issues of Access||
Establish specific/actionable and medically relevant admission, discharge and triage (ADT) policies supporting Ontario's critical care providers and patients.
|Health Human Resource Investments||
Establish, and support the achievement of provincially recognized standards in critical care nurse training and education programs.
|Surge Planning and Capacity Management||
Increase the number of critical care beds to address key pressure points, and develop alternatives for medically stable, chronically ventilated patients.