G. Raymond Chang Complex Medical Teaching Clinic unveiled at Toronto Western
December 18, 2019
With charitable support from the family of late philanthropist Ray Chang, a teaching clinic bearing his name was recently unveiled at the Herbert Ho Ping Kong Centre for Excellence in Education & Practice (CEEP) at Toronto Western Hospital.
The state-of-the-art G. Raymond Chang Complex Medicine Teaching Clinic will provide patients with timely access to comprehensive General Internal Medicine (GIM) services and enhance the education of trainees in new models of ambulatory care.
For clinical staff, it offers new opportunities for clinical service, research and quality improvement in ambulatory care.
Until several years ago, there wasn’t much of an ambulatory care program in GIM.
Dr. Edward Cole, the UHN Physician-in-Chief, said the major advances in that area have been critical in enhancing the UHN’s GIM and its delivery of patient care.
“The physicians that serve within General Internal Medicine are master clinicians and problem solvers,” he pointed out. “Responsible for serving the majority of our clinical care needs, they deal with challenging cases and elusive diagnoses. General Internal Medicine is home to expert diagnosticians who care for patients suffering from the most complex and co-existing medical conditions and they do so with the utmost compassion and a humanistic approach.”
Dr. Edward Cole
He said the name G. Raymond Chang will become synonymous with the physicians great work because of the benevolence of Chang’s widow, Donette Chin-Loy Chang, and his children Andrew Chang and Brigette Chang-Addorisio.
“It is through your support and the support of donors like yourselves that we as physicians and medical professionals are empowered to continue to provide our patients with excellent care and to give our trainees the best education possible,” Cole added. “GIM provides the lion share of education to our trainees in the Department of Medicine.”
Founded in 2008 by the retired Ho Ping Kong and Dr. Rodrigo Cavalcanti to serve as an incubator for innovative practice-oriented programs in medical education, the CEEP – which was established through a donation of $2.5 million from Chang -- also provides support for senior trainees in academic GIM.
Three years ago, the division of GIM undertook a significant re-organization of its outpatient clinics at Toronto Western Hospital to better fit patient needs.
The Chang family joined hospital staff at the launch of the new medicine teaching clinic
The new model re-imagined how the clinics deliver care by redesigning current clinics and creating new ones.
“We felt strongly that the patient experience should be at the centre of everything,” said Cavalcanti.
Dr. Tom MacMillan, who with Cavalcanti enabled the UHN to save nearly $280,000 in unnecessary testing costs by removing folate deficiency testing from the physician order entry, spearheaded the re-imaging of the new model.
“He helped to build two specific functions for the clinic,” said Cavalcanti. “There is a special emergency clinic that will support the emergency department in deferring admissions, allowing patients to be seen in a timely way and avoiding an admission to hospital which often could be a difficult experience for patients. The other thing is the clinic helping take care of patients immediately after discharge from hospital, allowing them to be secure in knowing the problems for which they were admitted to hospital will be taken care of in short order.”
Educating GIM trainees in understanding new models of ambulatory care is also a key component of the GIM re-design.
Cavalcanti said in the three years in which the clinic has grown, its services has expanded to daily from Monday to Friday and the number of patients seen by the clinic has grown by almost 200 per cent.
Dr. Rodrigo Cavalcanti
“We have helped 500 patients avoid admission to hospital and 1,000 patients been seen after their discharge from hospital,” he said. “On the education front, we have trained dozens of GIM trainees and our curriculum developed locally has been adopted citywide.”
The clinical educator thanked the Chang family for their support and trust in his team to honour Ray Chang’s legacy.
“The teaching clinic will bolster the work we do at the Ho Ping Kong Centre and the GIM Ambulatory Clinic at Toronto Western Hospital,” said Cavalcanti. “It will fund a professorship in GIM and ambulatory education and it will help us build a broader team and support other health care professionals such as room care nurses, pharmacists and social workers to provide more comprehensive care. It will also support the development of GIM education, including advanced tools to support the training in ambulatory care along with the presentation and dissemination of our work nationally and internationally.
“The big picture is the Ontario population is aging and the health care needs of an aging population increase. Most of those health care needs involve multi-system disease and a comprehensive approach as provided by GIM is instrumental in helping provide adequate care for them. Your family’s extraordinary philanthropy has enabled us at the Ho Ping Kong Centre to be on the leading edge of a new patient care model that is focused on the patient.”
Chang was very supportive of the work done by Ho Ping Kong and the Toronto Western Hospital.
“Ray wanted to enable transformative change outside the box solutions and a constant learning environment,” Chin-Loy Chang said. “We are strong believers in the health care system. Initiatives like these ensure that the wider community gets the best of what we have. We believe that every person is entitled to the highest standards in health care and education and are proud of the groundbreaking work at UHN and Toronto Western Hospital.”
Donette Chin-Loy Chang
Jamaican-born Ho Ping Kong, an award-winning physician, educator and master diagnostician, and Toronto General & Western Hospital Foundation Board of Directors Chair Raj Kothari attended the launch.
