About Our Members - Members

Members of ACAHO are either stand alone teaching hospitals with their own governance structure, or comprise a network of single hospital organizations or multi-site regional facilities with clinical programs ranging from primary care to highly specialized (i.e., tertiary and quaternary) health services that are governed by a regional (or provincial) health authority structure.

In addition to patient care. a distinguishing characteristic of ACAHO members is that they have formal institution-to-institution partnerships with universities. As a result, they work closely with the universities and their seventeen faculties of medicine in the provision of undergraduate and post-graduate medical education. They also have formal relationships with the faculties of health sciences (e.g., nursing, pharmacy and dentistry) and many colleges with other health professionals including physiotherapy, rehabilitation therapists, laboratory technicians, respiratory therapists and social workers - also defined as Academic Health Sciences Centres. As an extension, ACAHO members play a critical role in contributing to the education and training of the next generation of Canada's best and brightest health care professionals.

Importantly, ACAHO members - and their research institutes - provide the large majority of physical infrastructure to support and conduct basic and applied health research, medical discovery and innovation. In so doing, they contribute to the acceleration of scientific discovery, knowledge creation and its translation in three dimensions:

• By giving Canadians access to state-of-the-art information so that they can have a more direct influence on their health status
  
  
• By driving new evidence into clinical and administrative decision-making processes across the different sectors of the health system, and
  
  
• By discovering, developing and introducing innovative products and services to the marketplace, which contribute to the country's economic prosperity

ACAHO members as of April, 2009: