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| Name |
Bridgepoint Health |
| Address |
1 Bridgepoint Drive |
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| Town |
Toronto |
| State |
Ontario |
| Country |
Canada |
| Post Code |
M4M 2B5 |
| Phone |
416 461 8252 |
| Fax |
416 461 5696 |
| Email |
info@bridgepointhealth.ca |
| Website |
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Specialization Of Bridgepoint Health
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About Bridgepoint Health
** About Us **
Bridgepoint Health is becoming Canada’s leader in understanding, treating and managing complex chronic disease – the number one health care challenge of the 21st century.
Our dedicated care and support team includes over 1,400 staff, physicians and volunteers who are committed to changing the world for the thousands of inpatients and outpatients with complex chronic disease.
Since our inception in 1860, first as a House of Refuge for "incurables and the indigent poor", then as a Smallpox Hospital in 1872, followed by an Isolation Hospital to address communicable diseases in 1891, Bridgepoint Health has continued to evolve, meeting the most pressing health care issues of the time. Today, due to the success of modern medicine, people are living longer with many chronic diseases – known as complex chronic disease. As a result, there is an urgent need for specialized care, research and education in this critical and growing area of health care – a need Bridgepoint is here to address.
Our evidence-based care model focuses on delivering safe, high quality, patient care. Our dynamic environment celebrates and supports the potential and determination of our patients, as well as the skills and expertise of our specialized, multi-disciplinary care teams.
Supported by our affiliation with the University of Toronto, Bridgepoint is leading the way in understanding and treating complex chronic disease. Most existing research focuses on a single disease and rarely looks at how to treat people with multiple lifelong illnesses. The Bridgepoint Collaboratory for Research and Innovation will fill this gap by serving as a “hub” for researchers from around the world who are finding new ways to prevent and manage complex chronic disease.
** Our Vision **
To be Canada's leader in complex care and complex rehabilitation.
** Our Mission **
We change the world for people living with complex chronic disease and disability by
* Providing them with an integrated network of programs and services in
complex care and rehabilitation.
* Advancing knowledge, expertise, and care through research, teaching, and
learning.
* Engaging our community and health care partners to create a networked system
of support.
** Our Values **
* Meaningful Mission
Our work makes a difference. We are dedicated to providing compassionate, exceptional care and service.
* Integrity
We are committed to working together with trust and honesty, professionalism, accountability and acceptance.
* Investment, Growth and Development
We invest in people, relationships and our organization to ensure that we provide the best care and service possible.
* Leadership
We are innovative. Our decision-making is guided by evidence and expertise.
* Celebrating Individual Spirit, Hopes and Dreams
We are proud of our accomplishments. We celebrate and promote individual achievement, expression and worth.
* Social Responsibility
We passionately uphold the rights and needs of the people we serve and of our staff. We contribute to building a healthy community.
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History Of Bridgepoint Health
1820
Bridgepoint's history begins in the late 1700's with the John Scadding receiving a crown grant of 243 acres on Toronto's east side.
John Scadding was the estate manager and friend of Col. John Graves Simcoe, the Lieutenant of Upper Canada in 1791. Scadding received a crown grant of 243 acres on the east bank of the Don, from the bank of the Don to Scadding Road (now Broadview) on the east and from the lake north to Second Concession Road (now Danforth Avenue.).
When Simcoe returned to Devon, England in 1796 due to ill health, Scadding followed, managing Simcoe's estate. In 1818 Scadding returned to his Toronto estate. This estate still stands in Toronto as Toronto's oldest home and located on the CNE grounds.
The third home of Scadding was built north of where Riverdale Hospital now stands.
John Scadding died suddenly in 1824 at the age of 70. His widow and three sons were left to manage the farm.
On December 30, 1856, the City of Toronto paid the Scadding estate $10,000 pounds for 119 acres of land to build a jail, a house of correction, an industrial farm and a House of Refuge.
1859
The population rose from a community of almost 4000 people in 1831 to over 44,000 in 1861. The city had been incorporated in 1834 and the name changed from York to Toronto - the Mohawk word for the region. The demographics of the new Toronto were changing greatly too with Canadian born residents becoming the minority and European-born became the majority. The population of Toronto swelled from 23,000 in 1848 to 30,000 by 1850 as a result of mostly Irish Catholic peasant refugees escaping the ongoing famine. The new Irish presence was not warmly welcomed in Toronto. The Reformer George Brown, founding editor of the Globe, did not disguise his contempt for the Irish:
Irish beggars are to be met everywhere, and they are as ignorant and vicious as they are poor. They are lazy, improvident and unthankful; they fill our poorhouses and our prisons, and are as brutish in their superstition as Hindus.
Many arrived in Toronto under the most horrendous circumstances, and Toronto authorities did everything possible that they not remain in the city. Larratt Smith, a rising young city lawyer wrote his relatives back in England about the Irish immigrants in Toronto:
They arrive here to the extent of about 300 to 600 by any steamer. The sick are immediately sent to the hospital which had been given up to them entirely and the healthy are fed and allowed to occupy the Immigrant Sheds for 24 hours; at the expiration of this time, they are obliged to keep moving, their rations are stopped and if they are found begging are imprisoned at once. Means of conveyance are provided by the Corporation to take them off at once to the country, and they are accordingly carried off 'willy nilly' some 16 or 20 miles, North, South, East & West and quickly put down, leaving the country to support them by giving them employment...John Gamble advertised for 50 for the Vaughn plank road, and hardly were the placards out, than the Corporation bundled 500 out and set them down...The hospitals contain over 600 and besides the sick and convalescent, we have hundreds of widows and orphans to provide for.
From 1841 to 1848 the percentage of Catholics in Toronto rose from 17 to 25 percent. The new Irish immigrants were a tougher and more volatile people, hardened by the brutal life they experienced in Ireland. They were the source of some of Upper Canada's first violent labour unrest, rioting on the Welland Canal dig where many were employed at a subsistence wage. Some of the first big mob sectarian clashes in Ontario between the Protestant Orange and Catholic Green unfolded in the Niagara region around the canal construction during the 1840s.
As Toronto began to gradually nudge its way towards industrialization, many of the new Irish immigrants began to settle in the city seeking out unskilled employment. Although these types of statistics are not available for the early 1850s, those nearing the end of the decade and early 1860s give us a glimpse of Irish urbanization.
According to a Toronto Catholic Archdiocese census in the early 1860s, forty-five percent of Toronto's Catholics were unskilled labourers. The Irish, both Catholic and Protestant, also represented 67.3 percent of all arrests in 1858. Irish women, in 1860, corresponded to 84.4 percent of all female arrests, despite the fact that Irish composed a little over 25 percent of Toronto's total population.
Parallel to this, we begin to see emerging riots and clashes between Orange Protestant and Green Catholic factions increasingly displace the old Reformer vs. Tory brawls. Between 1852 and 1858, six major riots between Protestant and Catholic militants unfolded in Toronto. The city's Orange-dominated constabulary was of little help in quelling these disorders with any semblance of impartiality.
The 1850s would witness the first union organizing of unskilled workers as well as increasing militancy from skilled trade unions in the face of increasing mechanization and deskilling in manufacturing. In Toronto there were at least fourteen strikes between 1852-1854, a level of labour militancy not to be seen again until the 1870s. The news filtering back to Toronto of riots and revolutions throughout almost all of Europe in 1848, in which monarchies and governments fell, must have made local authorities contemplate the efficiency of the Toronto Police.
The nature of poverty was also beginning to change. Previously impoverished peoples were migratory and seasonal. With industrialization they were now becoming permanently settled in increasingly densely populated quarters of the city like Macaulaytown in Toronto's St. John's Ward.
Not only had the nature of the poor changed, but the nature of the wealthy and those in between as well. The rise of industrial manufacturing in Toronto created not only a new wealthy class, but also a larger property-owning middle-class, eligible to vote. The introduction of omnibuses in the late 1840s, and later street railways in 1860, segregated Toronto into neighborhoods by income and inevitably by class. The perceived threat to Toronto's middle-class property owners was gradually being shifted from that of spontaneous riots, rebellions, and occasional external incursions, to a more permanent and geographically fixed source from within the city, whose identification gradually began to shift from ethnic to one of class; a focus on the threat from 'dangerous classes' of unskilled working poor and destitute unemployed.
On December 30, 1856, the City of Toronto paid the Scadding estate 10,000 pounds for 119 acres of land to build a jail, a house of correction, an industrial farm and a House of Refuge.
On September 14, 1859, the cornerstone of the House of Refuge was laid. The House of Refuge and the jail were important solutions for the challenges of the time. The vision for the House of Refuge was described by the then Chairman of City Council, Jas.J.Vance, as:
a House for the relief of all indigent persons incapable of supporting themselves, such as the decrepit, deformed, and invalid poor, the helpless orphans, poor, the maimed, the blind, and all who from supernatural causes may be incompetent to provide for themselves.
Construction on the Don Jail also began in 1859. The building was designed in the Renaissance Revival style where the composition, scale and detailing are adopted from Italian Renaissance models. It is constructed of brick from Toronto brickyards and stone from quarries along the Niagara Escarpment and in Ohio. Ironwork, including fine interior decorative elements, came mostly from Toronto's St. Lawrence Foundry. The new jail was a showcase of local craftsmanship.
The Don Jail was originally patterned on the design of London's Pentonville Prison, which featured a panopticon plan with a centre pavilion and four radiating wings. However, the original plans were altered to reflect changing needs and new requirements imposed by the provincial government, which partly financed the prison. After numerous delays, setbacks (including a fire), and changes in contractors, the Don Jail was completed in 1864.
1860
The House of Refuge was completed by 1860. In reviewing applicants for the job of 'Keeper of the House', the Chairman of City Council, Jas.J. Vance described his challenge in finding the right candidate to the Council:
When it is considered that various trades and employments...will be under his supervision, and ..that he will also need to deal with the lewd, the dissolute.. the indigent, the idle.. the stubborn.. the vicious.. maimed and blind, the heaven-stricken, the aged, the orphaned.. the innocent and the idiotic.. for such reasons, it is demed inexpedient for the present to make any recommendation from among the applicants now offering.
But a keeper was found and the House served Toronto's needs at that time until a far greater need surfaced - the smallpox epidemic.
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