Unity Health Toronto supports employees growing their careers with tuition reimbursements.Supplied
There’s a certain kind of person who commits themselves to helping those who are less fortunate, experiencing homelessness or dealing with substance use in a big city. Those are the people who work at Unity Health Toronto – an integration of St. Michael’s Hospital (founded in 1892), St. Joseph’s Health Centre (1921) and Providence Healthcare (1857).
“This is a place that has its values in front to such an extreme level,” says Manson Locke, vice-president, people and chief human resources officer of Unity Health Toronto. “And that legacy of caring for people who are the most marginalized in our society is the same kind of care and focus that we turn inside on our staff.”
Five years after that integration, the network has become a leader in world-class specialty care, from neurosurgery and complex cardiovascular and cardiac care to treatment, education and research in multiple sclerosis, as well as advancing scientific knowledge through ground-breaking research that impacts patient care. Yet Unity Health remains true to its missions set out by the Sisters of St. Joseph over 100 years ago.
“That just attracts a special kind of person, and the values are nothing without them,” Locke says, “and our leadership team feels that they have a really significant obligation and purpose to care for those employees.”
As a fourth-year student, Joel Persaud was drawn to St. Michael’s by its reputation. “They call it the Urban Angel, but that’s truly what it was like,” says Persaud, a nurse in the Trauma-Neuro Intensive Care Unit (TNICU). “I thought it’d be a great experience both to expose myself to that level of care and to be able to help and serve people from different populations.”
Because Unity Health is an end-to-end health network, there are plenty of opportunities to move around, and it is encouraged. “When they take you in, they really invest in you and suggest training for different positions,” Persaud says.
He took advantage of that by enrolling in the highly regarded, fully sponsored three-month-long ICU course at George Brown College. “It was hard being in school, but it was great to be able to just focus on it while being supported by my manager and by St. Mike’s,” he says. “It definitely keeps me and a lot of my colleagues going, knowing that we’re encouraged to go on and do bigger things.”
Supporting the employees has huge benefits for Unity Health too, particularly for specialty departments like critical care, Emergency and operating rooms. “We take it on ourselves to put opportunities out there for staff to acquire that education so they can go and learn on paid time and have their certifications paid for,” Locke says. In return, Unity Health has been able to retain many of those people.
“We have programs to give them access to obvious things like tuition reimbursement, but they can come forward with their desire to do certifications and to do presentations and to be able to grow their careers any way they want,” he adds. “And I think that’s what’s helped us respond to the human resources pressures in health care perhaps better than some others.”
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