Senior Patient Relations Facilitator

Job Description

This is a Temporary Contract for up to Eighteen () Months

What begins as a conversation with one patient can become the blueprint for building more compassionate and equitable care for thousands. This Senior Patient Relations Facilitator role blends frontline advocacy with system-level impact with the aim of enhancing patient experiences and health equity. You’ll engage directly with patients and families in pivotal moments while facilitating resolution with clinical teams and leaders. Many of these cases involve medical-legal, human rights, accessibility, and patient safety issues, giving you the kind of exposure to enhance your expertise and credibility. With opportunities to present insights to senior leadership, physician chiefs, and cross-disciplinary teams, you’ll experience the visibility and influence to drive improvements at scale, while enriching your career journey with leadership-level impact.

Is this you?
You think beyond individual cases to the bigger picture. By analyzing feedback and identifying themes, you connect the dots between patient experiences and opportunities for system improvement. Your ability to synthesize complex information allows you to generate recommendations that will strengthen quality, safety, and equity across Sinai Health. This analytical mindset ensures that patient concerns contribute to lasting organizational change.

Empathy and compassion are at the heart of your approach, allowing you to connect authentically with patients and families and make them feel truly heard and valued, even in difficult circumstances. With diplomacy and composure, you excel at facilitating difficult discussions, mediating conflict, and negotiating diplomatically to reach constructive outcomes. With the ability to liaise confidently across all levels, from frontline clinicians to senior hospital leaders and external organizations, you align perspectives to strengthen organizational decisions.

Improvement-focused and guided by an optimistic mindset, you see possibility where others might see barriers. You bring this outlook to a role that is uniquely broad in scope. Navigating patient relations at Sinai Health includes acute care, rehabilitation, complex continuing care, community services, and research, a reach not available in most health care organizations. An enthusiasm fuels your ability to transform challenges into improvements that benefit patients across the continuum of care.

About this team:
At Sinai Health, the Patient Relations team plays a vital role in strengthening the patient and family experience. With a presence at Mount Sinai Hospital and Hennick Bridgepoint Hospital, our team supports patients, families, and caregivers across Sinai Health by ensuring concerns are addressed with fairness, respect, and compassion. Our services include listening and resolution support, mediation and facilitation of discussions between families and care teams, and clear guidance about rights, policies, and available resources. We also provide staff and physicians with consultation, tools, and training to improve communication and conflict resolution skills. By reviewing patient feedback, we identify themes and share insights with leaders to drive improvements in quality, safety, and equity. By bridging the perspectives of patients and providers, the team contributes to a culture of learning, collaboration, and continuous improvement.

In this role you will:

• Identify and receive patient concerns with potential multi-area concerns, medical-legal implications, patient safety issues, AODA issues, human rights violations, or high organizational risk, serving as the primary conduit for communication and response
• Draft correspondence on behalf of CEO, Senior Leadership and Physician Chiefs as required
• Facilitate timely resolution of complex patient and family concerns while ensuring individuals remain informed throughout the patient relations process as outlined in hospital policy
• Coach staff and physicians on communication styles and stakeholder perspectives, mediation and conflict resolution
• Arrange and facilitate family meetings, when necessary, with patients and families and the healthcare team
• Provide patients and families with information on current policies, procedures, protocols, and rights, in addition to directing patients and their families to the appropriate services and resources
• Escalate issues with significant patient safety and organizational risk to appropriate Senior Leadership
• Ensure appropriate documentation of the patient relations process in the Patient Feedback database, while monitoring, improving and ensuring consistency across patient relations information systems; provide analysis of data to inform quality improvement
• Actively support investigation and analysis by integrating patient and caregiver experience survey results with resolution themes to identify strategic opportunities for improvement
• Identify patients and families to collaborate on quality improvement and system change, supporting the collection of information through channels outside the Patient Relations process, and develop methods with recommended targets to evaluate the effectiveness of the process
• Support quality improvement initiatives related to patient experience and health equity, providing reporting to stakeholders on patient relations opportunities in support of quality improvement planning. Develop and implement policies, procedures, and guidelines that support this work
• Develop education strategies, implementation plans and materials regarding patient relations, while providing consultative support to managers on complex patient experience and conflict issues
• Manage Patient Relations correspondence with the Ontario Patient Ombudsman’s office with coordination of Sinai Health response
• Participate as a member of external associations as appropriate
• Lead and collaborate on research initiatives to support the academic mandate of Sinai Health
• Perform other duties consistent with the job classification as required

Job Requirements

Job Requirements:

Mandatory

• Bachelor’s degree in health or social sciences
• 5 years of experience working in a clinical healthcare environment

Preferred

• Registered with active membership in a regulated health profession
• Master’s degree in health sciences, social sciences, or a related field
• Certification and or advanced training in mediation, risk management and patient family centred care, ethics

Skills and Knowledge

• Knowledge of health risk management practices and health law (i.e. human rights and health equity complaints, risk management processes, civil litigation, relevant legislation e.g. ECFAA, AODA, PHIPA)
• Knowledge and experience of hospital organization and health care delivery system
• Applied knowledge in quality and process improvement especially related to patient experience and health equity
• Excellent listening, interviewing, verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to liaise objectively and effectively with patients, families and staff at all levels of the Hospital
• Demonstrated proficiency in computer skills, including familiarity with database applications and statistical analysis
• Ability to function independently and co-operatively in a multidisciplinary environment
• Excellent organizational and time management skills
• Demonstrated ability to use discretion, act maturely and be sensitive to individual needs
• Demonstrated ability to use good judgement and make decisive and independent decisions
• Proven ability to work effectively and remain composed in a high-pressure environment
• Demonstrated satisfactory work performance and attendance record