New Waterfront Campus one year from opening

Join us today at Sherbourne Common Park to celebrate the one year count down to opening our new Waterfront health Sciences Campus. Today's Globe has an interview with GBC President Anne Sado discussing the new campus and its focus on interprofessional health sciences education. The new campus will also feature significant new applied research capacity for GBC; it will be the nucleus of the Interprofessional Online Research and Technology Assessment Lab (I-PORTAL).

I-PORTAL will be a prominent element within George Brown College's East Bayfront Campus currently being built on the Toronto waterfront. This new campus will see the consolidation and further integration of GBC's health sciences education and training programs, with an even greater emphasis on interprofessional health care practices (building upon GBC's leading Interprofessional Learning Centre). I-PORTAL will form part of the GBC Research Labs and encompass new or expanded clinical simulation, visualization, prototype fabrication, design studio, operational community clinic and incubator/accelerator business venture development infrastructure that accesses the realistic training facilities serving our educational mandate. The Waterfront Campus will be the centrepiece of our business innovation support, and will be linked through cutting edge networking and video conferencing to advanced prototyping facilities at our Casa Loma and St James campuses, and our world-leading prosthetics and orthotics clinical, education and applied research facility at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. Together, these areas will offer local industry a prominent point of access to all of our applied research and innovation support services through the revitalized port lands on the Toronto Waterfront. 

New Waterfront Campus receives federal funding

GBC's new Waterfront campus, currently in the design stage, has received $30M in federal funding, part of the recent federal infrastructure spending. These funds are in addition to the funds already committed by the Province of Ontario. The new campus will be a significant anchor for interprofessional health sciences education in the GTA health cluster. The campus will also feature applied research capacity--the George Brown College Health Sciences Inter-Professional Online Research and Technology Assessment Laboratory (I-PORTAL). I-PORTAL will establish a significant new capability for applied research and technology design, prototyping, development and commercialization in the context of interprofessional health care.

George Brown College to build new waterfront campus, expand health education and research

It's now official - GBC's new waterfront campus has received funding to be built on Toronto's East Bayfront. As reported earlier by the Toronto Star, the new campus will enable us to support continued growth as the GTA exceeds post-secondary education capacity. As the press release states:

Once built, the new campus will be a unifying new home for George Brown’s Centre for Health Sciences, bringing together its many programs currently spread across existing campuses. As a leader in Interprofessional Education, this new expansion is clearly aligned with HealthForce Ontario’s Blueprint for Action on Interprofessional Care. It will also enable the college to train more Health Science workers in response to critical skills shortages. Already among the province’s largest nursing schools, this expansion will allow George Brown to accommodate an additional 1,300 new nursing students by 2015, helping meet the government’s commitment to hire 9,000 nurses and create nurse led clinics.

GBC Research is applying to the Canada Foundation for Innovation for funds to expand the health sciences research space in the new campus. The George Brown College Health Sciences Inter-Professional Online Research and Technology Assessment Laboratory (I-PORTAL) will add a significant and complementary applied research capacity to the GTA health sciences research institutions with whom we work and train health care workers.

In other health sciences news, GBC and Trent University continue to explore a collaboration agreement based in Nursing.

Innovation needs a backbone

ORION's new CEO Darin Graham spoke to the Greater Toronto Marketing Alliance earlier this week on the topic "Innovation needs a backbone." Graham's talk was an excellent call to industry to invest in R&D, as well as for those of us in the public innovation support sector to work together in supporting industry innovation. ORION provides the necessary ICT capacity to enable collaboration in the public R&D sector, and opening this up to the private sector is a good example of what a P3RD (see "the innovation equation") innovation support system can be.

Graham reminded us that innovation does not inherently exist in the universities and colleges; rather, it is inherent in the people who go there - the students, faculty and our industry partners. He also reminded us that innovation in not invention. Innovation has outcomes in the realization of social and/or economic value. Fostering innovation is at once as easy as enabling serendipity and interprofessional collaborations, but as difficult as doing this in a world of competing values, cultures ("academic: publish or perish versus private: profit or perish") and priorities. To enable innovation we need transparency in terms of our interface among organizations (c.f. brokering R&D relationships) and in our approach to intellectual property. This form of open innovation will push productivity improvements through a complementary approach to enabling industry innovation through a robust innovation infrastructure, in this case the ICT products and services that are the interface to collaboration as well as the locus of R&D development itself.

And while we are on the topic of enabling innovation, here is a link to a recent article that reinforces the need to invest in education as a main driver for an innovative economy. This includes integrating immigrants into the work force and addressing the skills gap and skills shortages we face. Ensuring we have highly qualified and skilled people with innovation literacy across all economic sectors will help lift Canada's poor productivity performance.

Creativity and the Canadian Innovation Agenda

Gary Goodyear, Minister of State for Science and Technology, appeared at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences yesterday to reaffirm the importance of creativity to Canadian innovation. Creativity is a staple of innovation literacy, and there is a valuable contribution from the humanities and social sciences to the innovation agenda, as mentioned in my post a few days ago. Setting national research priorities and marshaling our collective resources toward these is important, as is acknowledging interprofessional and disparate views on the social and economic productivity challenges in Canada.

Conference on People-Centred Healthcare a Success

The Canadian Association for People-Centred Health convened a one day conference last Friday on People-Centred eHealth Research. The event was a huge success, bringing together many prominent researchers and industry organizations interested in moving the eHealth agenda forward. The Forum was held at North York General Hospital, site of a future community-embedded health innovation lab. GBC is a partner in the CAPCH.

Of particular note is the confluence of academic and industry partnerships that are engaging in complementary research. This is an excellent example of the innovation equation: public-private partnerships conducting research and development together to support common aims (P3RD). Canada needs more of these sorts of partnerships. Recent announcements by CIHR and NSERC - with the former's Industry-Partnered Collaborative Research Operating Grant and the latter's Strategic Partnerships Initiative - are good examples of how our public funders are mobilizing to address Canada's historical shortfall in realizing the benefits of our publicly-funded R&D.

The Canadian Association for People-Centred Health's Academic Research Collaborative, chaired by Dr. Alex Jadad, is seeking to "empower and utilize independent, autonomous research" that supports a more people-centred approach to healthcare. GBC's faculty interests in eHealth, simulation and interprofessional healthcare are areas where we will participate in the Collaborative. Our project on diabetic-friendly ethnic cuisine, led by Professor Sobia Khan, is an excellent fit with extant projects currently underway at CAPCH. Watch this space for updates as we connect to other researchers supporting people-centred health.

OCAD Health Summit a Success

Cultural Knowledge and the Healthy Society closed yesterday, having generated some great discussion on the role of design research in healthcare. The program featured many excellent speakers from a wide range of disciplines in health, human factors and design, all oriented toward finding meaningful ways to work together to promote a healthy society. Debate and discussion resulted in solid foundations for future partnerships as well as raising the issues of interprofessional research and the importance of design disciplines in the Canadian innovation agenda. Watch this space, as well as OCAD, for more results as they emerge.

Engineering health systems research

Yesterday's Report on Business had a section on Health Innovations, which included an interesting article on Electronic Health Records (EHR), and a good piece on how "Engineering techniques can be used to eliminate inefficiencies in Canada's health care system." The latter highlights the new University of Toronto Centre for Research in Healthcare Engineering. Michael Carter, CRHE Director, outlines in the article the ad hoc history how the Canadian healthcare system has been configured, and how engineering can be used to solve inefficiencies. As Carter says, "Nobody ever designed the health care system. Nobody ever sat down and said, 'This is how we should deliver care.' It's sort of piecemeal."

This is an important front in health and human services research. It's time to take a systems view of how healthcare can function - the Health Canada Interprofessional Education for Collaborative Patient-Centred Practice envelope is one part of this effort. This requires complex change management, strong leadership (political and institutional), and a commitment to patient care within a collective effort at change in health systems and human services, health promotion, patient empowerment, and health systems utilization. GBC Health Sciences have a strong base of faculty interested in research in the health and human services fields, including working proactively to anticipate change in the healthcare environment of the future, particularly as this involves the increasing use of health information technologies. Some of these issues were raised at the CONII Health Sciences Node Symposium. We have an opportunity to participate in health systems change. Our applied research facilities and capabilities are complementary to work being done at the CRHE.

The memetics of innovation

A book review published today under the byline “Innovation” offers some good insights on collaboration. The review cites Richard Dawkins’s theory of memes – ideas that propagate themselves like genes – as a metaphor for understanding the intersection of professional boundaries as the nexus of innovation. Interdisciplinary, interprofessional, multidisciplinary – all of these words are used to describe the collision of ideas and professional boundaries.

Invention is accidental; putting disparate elements together fosters instances of understanding and connection. This is the goal of innovation.