Meet Dr. David Urbach

Head, Department of Surgery

“Here at WCH, our nimbleness, flexibility, and willingness to experiment and innovate is our greatest strength.”

“WCH is the only academic, fully outpatient hospital in Canada and we are a true incubator for system change. Rather than just fill gaps in current needs or increasing capacity, we’re developing programs that change the model of care to be more accessible, equitable and efficient for everyone.

As an example, we demonstrated to the wider healthcare community that you can provide same-day discharge after knee and hip replacements—a huge innovation in addressing capacity backlogs. We’ve demonstrated that you don’t need hospital beds for these types of procedures, which highlights our mandate of improving the way care is delivered both at WCH and at hospitals around the world. 

We view our ‘patient’ as the entire population—everyone who needs us, rather than only the people who are able to make it into our clinics. As physicians, this is a huge change in perspective, it focuses us to always think about the entire system and population, about how we can reach the people without equitable system access, which refocuses the way we implement new models of care.”