‘Some challenges, lots of change’: WRHN celebrates one year since hospital merger

April 1 marks the first anniversary of the merger of the hospitals in Kitchener into the Waterloo Regional Health Network.

CEO and President, Ron Gagnon, spoke with 570 NewsRadio about the milestone, and said, “Being a first year, it’s been an exciting year. It hasn’t been a year without some challenges, lots of change.”

He thanked the 7,000 people who work for WRHN, saying he’s filled with an immense sense of pride for what the team has accomplished, adding that mergers like these are not easy.

He said he still hears the old hospital names of Grand River, St. Mary’s, and Freeport, but he says he’s seeing and hearing the new names more often in common use: WRHN at Midtown, WRHN at Queen’s Boulevard, and WRHN at Chicopee, respectively.

Gagnon said the number of layoffs due to duplicating services with the hospitals’ merging has been very small, as they worked to redeploy staff to other parts of the organization and to leverage retirements.

For the successes from the first year of WRHN, Gagnon highlighted how they merged best practices from the former Grand River and St. Mary’s, freeing up 35 beds per day.

He added that with a 5 per cent increase in people coming out to WRHN sites, if they hadn’t managed to save those beds, the impact of congestion and pressure on the hospitals would have been much more acute.

Gagnon said WRHN is facing a deficit this year, after a few years of surpluses from the old hospitals, adding that the amount of funding from the province has not kept pace with health care inflation and the aging and growing population.

But he said WRHN’s actual costs are $35 million less than the expected costs, based on provincial formulas.

Gagnon says on the patient care side, WRHN continues to be a leader in cardiac care, highlighting how they were the first in Ontario to use “smart sync MRI” for heart device patients.

WRHN has seen “revolutionary” approaches to spinal surgery, letting people stay awake during the procedures, with patients going home the very same day.

Gagnon said there were also breakthroughs in paediatrics and endoscopy.

He said for WRHN Year 2, they’ll continue to work toward opening their new hospital, WRHN at The University, in 2035, saying there’s lots of “heavy lifting” still to do.

Strategies are coming together to have an employer of choice; high reliability, furthering progress on delivering care outside their walls; and to become a digitally and AI-enabled organization.

A social media post from WRHN on Tuesday announced the “clear directions” of the 2026-2029 strategic plan: thriving teams deliver outstanding care; advance personalized care; build the WRHN network for better health.

Gagnon said change is never easy, and the change his team members have gone through, and what they’ve been able to do, “is quite encouraging, and it’s inspiring for me.”

“It give me all kinds of confidence of what WRHN is going to be able to accomplish in the years ahead.”

---