Vision & Strategic Priorities

1.    Cultivate a professional environment that promotes well-being and builds pride, belonging, and shared purpose.

Key Activities:

1. Provide mentorship and resources to foster professional growth and long-term retention of faculty and trainees across all career stages.
2. Reduce the administrative burden associated with departmental processes such as appointments, promotions, and continuing faculty appointment reviews.
3. Design departmental events that promote well-being and belonging and celebrate achievement.
4. Support equity, diversity, Indigeneity, inclusivity, and accessibility in departmental practices and processes.
5. Highlight the work and impact of the department to build trust and inspire members of the university community and the public.

2.    Enable collaboration and strengthen the department’s potential by connecting people, systems, practices, and resources.

Key Activities:

1. Support cross-site and cross-divisional events and initiatives that promote opportunities for collaboration.
2. Recognize collaborative contributions and broader definitions of scholarly impact in appointments, promotions, and awards criteria, in alignment with the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) framework.

1.    Maintain excellence in education across all stages of training. 

Key Activities:

1. Foster a collaborative environment that supports both learners and teachers.
2. Prepare trainees for future practice by emphasizing excellence through clinical exposure and patient-centred care. 
3. Ensure both program directors and administrators are appropriately supported in alignment with Royal College and Postgraduate Medical Education standards.
4. Encourage educational innovation that incorporates developments in artificial intelligence and emerging technologies, and explore the ethical implications of these approaches.
5. Promote trainee interest in research and provide pathways and support for research during residency and advanced training programs.

2.    Optimize faculty and trainee evaluation systems to promote a feedback culture grounded in mutual trust, respect, and learning.

Key Activities:

1. Review and improve how faculty teaching evaluations are completed and used.
2. Review and improve how trainee evaluations are completed and used, including those associated with Competence by Design.
3. Teach approaches to providing effective and actionable feedback.

3.    Share our expertise through continuing education and professional development.

Key Activities:

1. Develop department-wide continuing education events and conferences to enable knowledge dissemination and to increase the profile of the department.
2. Support and refine existing continuing educational programs such as the Master Teacher Program.

1.    Reduce inter-institutional barriers to research.

Key activities:

1. Work to reduce barriers to TAHSN inter-institutional research collaborations.
2. Leverage the University of Toronto and TAHSN research ecosystem to ensure that DoM researchers benefit from existing resources, state-of-the-art technologies, and databases such as GEMINI.

2.    Support our researchers, clinicians in quality and innovation, and other scholars.

Key activities:

1. Have an integrated approach to strategic recruitment of physician researchers with hospitals and research institutes.
2. Identify ongoing sources of funding, especially salary support, for physician researchers.
3. Ensure competitive and fair processes to distribute research funding.
4. Maintain an up-to-date repository of researchers’ programs to facilitate fundraising and communication.
5. Enable a learning health system approach within the department that facilitates quality improvement and patient safety initiatives.
6. Develop opportunities for national and international quality and innovation knowledge exchange. 

1.    Ensure the department’s work informs practice and policy.

Key Activities: 

1. Create a hub in health systems research to work in partnership with government agencies and other key parties to improve health system performance.
2. Build capacity in health systems research through student training.
3. Strive to reduce health inequities for diverse populations and address the calls to action on Indigenous health from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous peoples.

2.    Advance innovation and entrepreneurship.

Key Activities: 

1. Ensure that faculty and trainees have access to training, coaching, and other supports for innovation, entrepreneurship, and commercialization.
2. Recognize academic contributions in these areas.

3.    Demonstrate our commitment to planetary health.

Key Activities:

1. Develop a departmental strategy on planetary health that enables research, education, and quality and innovation in this field.
2. Identify opportunities to integrate sustainable practices throughout our department.

To support continued growth and the actions in this plan, the department must strengthen its financial sustainability. To accomplish this, we will undertake a financial review that identifies opportunities to grow diversified revenue and find savings.