The St. Michael's Story

Facts about St. Michael's

St. Michael's Hospital from the intersection of Queen St. and Victoria St., Dec. 2014.

By the numbers

(April 1, 2019 to March 31, 2020)

459 acute adult inpatient beds
6,335 staff
875 medical staff
3,366 medical trainees and health professional learners
2,530 babies born
79,433 emergency visits annually
874,530 ambulatory visits
350,764 diagnostic, therapeutic and other visits
48,067 family health team clinics’ enrollments
more than 2 million square feet of property
Approximately $88.95 million in research funding (across Unity Health Toronto)

St. Michael’s Firsts

1920: St. Michael's becomes formally affiliated with the University of Toronto.

1936: St. Michael's becomes the first hospital in the country approved to train dietitians.

1936: St. Michael’s opens first school for medical record librarians in Canada, founded by Sister Mary Paul Biss.

1958: St. Michael's becomes one of the first hospitals in Ontario to perform open heart surgery.

1963: St. Michael’s Dr. John Wilson and Dr. Peter Forbath perform first successful cardioversion in Canada.

1968: Dr. Clare Baker leads to a cardiac team of 30 specialists to perform the first truly successful heart transplant in Canada. Recipient Charles Perrin Johnston lived six years, the longest time for any heart transplant recipient in the world at that time.

1976: St. Michael's performs the first muscle transplant in North America.

1988: St. Michael’s Dr. Alan Hudson and Dr. Susan McKinnon perform the first sciatic nerve transplant in the world.

2000: Surgeons at St. Michael's perform Ontario's first live-donor kidney retrieval using minimally-invasive surgery.

2001: St. Michael's becomes the first hospital in Canada to perform an endoscopy procedure using a camera capsule.

2003: St. Michael's cardiologist Dr. Michael Kutryk, implants the first antibody-coated coronary stent at the University Hospital Rotterdam in Holland.

2008: Dr. Guylaine Lefebvre performs the first myomectomy in Canada - the surgical removal of a uterine tumour - without damage to the uterus using a surgical robot.

2011: Drs. Jeff Zaltzman, Katerina Pavenski and Ramesh Prasad became the first in North America to use a blood-cleaning procedure that made it possible to transplant a kidney between two people with different blood types.

2015: Drs. Neil Fam, Mark Peterson and Chris Buller performed Canada's first mitral valve-in-valve procedure that allows cardiac patients to go home the next day instead of staying in hospital for up to 10 days.

2015: Urologist Dr. Jason Lee became the first in Canada to perform kidney autotransplant using robotic surgery.

2017: Interventional cardiologist Dr. Neil Fam became the first in the world to successfully insert a MitraClip through a patient's jugular vein rather than the femoral vein.

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