Physical distancing is especially critical for our vulnerable cancer patients. Your donation today will support technology to help patients stay connected, while keeping them at a safe distance.

     Connecting Patients with their Cancer Team

The Princess Margaret has been developing Smart Cancer Care, which uses technology to streamline cancer care and integrate research into the clinic. The COVID-19 pandemic has kicked Smart Cancer Care into high gear with the urgent need for patients to stay safely in their homes. In just 11 days last month, our Smart Cancer Care team designed and launched a new system to enable virtual visits (by phone and video) for patients. We are able to reduce in-person visits by 500-700 appointments a day, while patient satisfaction with the convenient new system remained high.

Your gift today will help expand virtual visits across the Cancer Centre and enable new digital services, such as ordering prescriptions and offering follow-up appointments.

      Connecting Patients with Loved Ones

Like other hospitals across Ontario, The Princess Margaret has implemented a “no visitor” policy to prevent the spread of COVID-19. For our sickest patients who need the expert care provided on our in-patient units, separation from family and friends can be really tough. That loss of contact is most keenly felt by people in our Palliative Care Unit. Your gift will help to connect isolated patients with their loved ones by helping to buy digital tablets for every in-patient unit at The Princess Margaret.

Our frontline workers have put their lives on hold to ensure cancer patients are safe, especially our most vulnerable patients and those who have been diagnosed with COVID-19.

In appreciation of their selfless efforts, you can help provide our frontline staff with hotel rooms so they can avoid taking home the virus to their families, free parking at the Cancer Centre so they can steer clear of exposure to the virus on public transit, and nutritious meals during their shift to maintain their energy. Your gift will help ensure our healthcare workers have the support they need to care for cancer patients during this crisis.

Just as production lines across the country are being repurposed to make face masks, hand sanitizer, and ventilators, The Princess Margaret is leveraging its world-class research and clinical trials platform to find ways to defeat COVID-19.

Few research centres anywhere have the capacity to rapidly launch and execute emergency trials during a crisis, while still maintaining excellence in their current trials. The Princess Margaret is one of them. We run the largest early phase clinical trials program in Canada and one of the most robust in North America.

Our leaders have achieved unprecedented fast-tracked permission to launch COVID-19 clinical trials in two to four days, a process that usually takes four to six months. Your gift today will help stop COVID-19 in its tracks by funding clinical trials designed to:

• Develop rapid and early detection tests for COVID-19, especially to protect cancer patients.
• Develop COVID-19 treatments for cancer patients.
• Help our healthcare teams to quickly adapt our patients’ complex cancer treatments to offset any interactions with COVID-19 therapies.
•  Find accurate ways to track and manage the transmission of COVID-19, using sophisticated computer models and self-collected specimens from staff, to protect both frontline workers and patients.

Your donation will help researchers at The Princess Margaret to quickly learn about COVID-19 and immediately share those findings broadly to help cancer patients and frontline workers across Canada and around the world.