2025-2026 Annual Report

The Ottawa Hospital

Welcome to The Ottawa Hospital’s 2025-26 Annual Report, in which we highlight just a few the remarkable achievements of our many exceptional teams over the past year.

Our Strategic Plan commits us to reshaping the future of health care for our community, and this year we made major strides towards that goal. Our teams continue to find new ways to improve patient outcomes and enhance the patient experience, even as we build new partnerships, implement new care models, adopt new technologies and lower our carbon footprint, all to create a more responsive, resilient and effective health care system.

This year we Enriched the Quality of Care for Patients by extending care further into the community, so more people get the care they need where and when they need it. We launched the Hospital@Home program, broke ground on a new long-term care facility, expanded our regional surgical partnerships, added a Mobile Crisis Response Team (MCRT) for community-based crisis intervention, and launched the Virtual Critical Care Program (VCCP), enabling frontline physicians at the Qikiqtani General Hospital and in all 12 Qikiqtaaluk communities to connect virtually with critical care specialists at TOH. 

Igniting the Power of People remains a priority. In 2023, 60 per cent of staff agreed that TOH offers them growth and development opportunities. In 2025 that number climbed to 69 per cent as we added a new Emerging Leader Program and free staff access to LinkedIn Learning and Rosetta Stone to our professional development offerings. Additionally, this year more of our clinicians – supported by a strong governance policy and extensive training – successfully began using AI to reduce administrative backlogs and improve patient outcomes.

TOH continues to Accelerate Discovery through leading-edge research, education and innovation — not just in clinical programs but in campus design, digital systems, environmental services and elsewhere. This year we focused on breaking down barriers and further cultivating our strong culture of discovery by fostering new partnerships, building new research infrastructure and by announcing the integration of The Ottawa Hospital Research Institute and The Ottawa Hospital boards as a first step towards full Integration.

This past year we Nurtured our Social Responsibility in several key spheres of activity. For example, our Facilities and Pharmacy teams took significant strides in implementing sustainable technologies, reducing both energy consumption and medical waste. Meanwhile we continued to enact our commitment to reconciliation, in part by expanding the rollout of our Cultural Safety Learning Program to all staff and volunteers, and by introducing of a new Inuit Patient Navigator role to help Inuit patients navigate the complexities of hospital care.

We invite you to explore this annual report to learn more about the remarkable talent, passion and dedication of the people whom we are privileged to work with at TOH.

Finally, we would be remiss if we did not gratefully acknowledge the tremendous support we received from our community this year. Thanks to your continuing generosity our foundation will surely attain its $500m capital campaign goal.

Ottawa Hospital Research Institute

It has been a year of great impact, hope and change at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute (OHRI).

Our clinical trials are continuing to provide new and innovative treatment options for conditions such as cancer, neuromuscular disease and critical illness. In addition to saving and transforming the lives of patients at The Ottawa Hospital (TOH), these trials are also changing how care is provided around the world.

At the same time, our laboratory discoveries are advancing our understanding of devastating diseases, providing hope for patients and families and fuelling the growing life science ecosystem in our region. 

With world-leading platforms for discovery, biomanufacturing, clinical and implementation research, all embedded in one of Canada’s largest hospitals, we’ve been uniquely successful in bringing new therapies to patients and positive change to our health-care system. This success is reflected in our impact stories and fast facts for the last year.

For 25 years, OHRI has been the engine driving research forward at TOH, in partnership with clinicians and scientists. In addition to our impact on patient care and discovery, we’ve also created innovative tools to streamline research and move science forward effectively and efficiently, thanks to our outstanding research administration team. We’ve also trained and mentored thousands of graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and residents in partnership with the University of Ottawa.

In recent years, OHRI has become increasingly aligned and integrated with TOH. This growing integration has strengthened our ability to translate research into better patient care. The OHRI and TOH Boards have now agreed to move forward with a more complete integration, with oversight under a single joint Board of Governors. 

A central goal of this work is to ensure that research remains a core priority within TOH, supported by governance and funding structures that enable it to thrive. Importantly, these changes also bring our organizational structure more in line with the largest and most successful research hospitals in Canada. 

At the heart of this integration is the clear vision that research is care and discovery is our hope for tomorrow. As TOH continues to work towards the goal of reshaping the future of health care, a strong and integrated research enterprise will be more important than ever.

On behalf of the OHRI Board of Directors and Senior Leadership Team, we thank all our dedicated trainees, researchers, clinicians and staff for their hard work and commitment to world-leading science, innovation and patient care. We also thank the many patients, donors and partners who contribute to our research.