The Hospital For Sick Children (Toronto, Ontario)

 children's hospital  Add category

555 University Avenue
Toronto, ON M5G 1X8, Canada
(416) 813-1500
www.sickkids.ca/

The Hospital for Sick Children (also known as SickKids Hospital) is a major paediatric centre for the Greater Toronto Area, serving patients up to age 18. Located on University Avenue in Downtown Toronto, SickKids is part of the city’s Discovery District, a critical mass of scientists and entrepreneurs who are focused on innovation and application of new ideas and knowledge. SickKids is a teaching hospital for the University of Toronto.

Sick Kids is one five free-standing children's hospitals in Canada (others being Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario in Ottawa, Alberta Children's Hospital in Calgary, BC Children's Hospital in Vancouver and IWK Health Centre in Halifax).

SickKids has built an integrated environment of patient care, research and learning with six centres of excellence, in bone health, brain and behaviour, cancer, cystic fibrosis, heart, pain and transplantation. In 2009–2010, SickKids admitted 14,000 in-patients who stayed for an average of 7.1 days. The operating room treated 11,000 cases; there were 58,000 visits to the emergency department and 215,000 visits to the hospital’s ambulatory clinics. SickKids has about 370 beds and provides the highest level of complex and specialized paediatric family-centred care.

The SickKids Research Institute is the largest child health research institute in Canada. It employs almost 2,000 people, or a quarter of the SickKids workforce. The Research Institute is known for its groundbreaking research in stem cells, childhood cancer, cystic fibrosis and other diseases, and is home to the Database of Genomic Variations, known as the Toronto Database.

The Learning Institute was established in 2007 to support all forms of learning, from formal training of health-care workers, to the education of patients and families and the transfer of knowledge to the community. SickKids shares its knowledge globally through SickKids International.

Since 1972, the hospital has been equipped with a rooftop helipad (CNW8). It is one of two downtown Toronto hospitals with a helipad (other being St. Michael's Hospital) and one of three in Toronto (the third being at Sunnybrook Hospital).