The room had run out of chairs, and more than a hundred people were sitting on the floor. Some were already visibly concerned before Altaf Stationwala even said a word.
It was 2003, Altaf was in his early thirties, and he was a Vice President at William Osler Health System and site executive at Etobicoke General Hospital. On that day, he received news from the Ontario government that Etobicoke General would be converted into a SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) hospital. He was tasked with informing the hospital’s staff, and for a young executive, it was a defining test of leadership.
The SARS outbreak had seized Toronto in early 2003 in a way few other health crises had before. The Ontario government’s logic was simple: Etobicoke General was close to Toronto Pearson International Airport and “that made it useful,” Altaf recalls.
“But up until that point, the hospital had not had a single SARS patient,” he says. “That’s why the news was so much harder to break to people.” When staff asked him, “Why?” he told them the truth—that he didn’t have all the answers.
As he looked around that room, some people were in tears, and some even gave him their resignation. Altaf says he let it all happen, believing that getting through it together required letting people feel their fear and even their anger.
But his commitment to every person in that room was concrete. He gave them proof that the hospital was ready: personal protective equipment, extensive training, and a promise that no one on the SARS ward would be there unless they volunteered. With that, every person who had resigned came back. Enough people volunteered to staff the unit. And when the first SARS patient arrived at Etobicoke General, Altaf suited up and walked through the ward doors himself.
“The gear was heavy,” he says. “I was terrified. But it was the right thing to do. It was the only thing to do.”
Reflecting on these moments, Altaf says it taught him about real leadership. “It’s about people caring for people,” he says, noting the human dimension of healthcare delivery has been the fixed point in his thinking ever since.
An unwavering mission
Now President and CEO of Unity Health Toronto, Altaf brings that thinking to St. Michael’s Hospital, Providence Healthcare, and St. Joseph’s Health Centre. His first weeks were, by his own description, focused on discovery.
On his fourth day, he stumbled upon the original Bond Street entrance of St. Michael’s Hospital. He describes the statue of St. Michael at the entrance and the plaque accompanying it: an acknowledgment in stone of more than a century of devotion from the Sisters of St. Joseph, who had founded not just St. Mike’s but all three Unity sites.
He recalls standing in front of the statue for a long while, thinking about legacy. He says the sisters had done it all: patient care, administration, fundraising—everything that a modern health system does, they did first, and they did it to build health and social services that didn’t yet exist in a city that desperately needed them.
“For me, that history is a beacon,” he says. “And the beacon is always asking: would the sisters approve?”
Every morning that Altaf walks into St. Mike’s, he passes a person unhoused at the corner of Victoria and Queen Streets.
“I find it hard,” he says. “But we’re supposed to find it hard. It is hard. And we become indifferent when we say, ‘I can’t solve it, I can’t fix it, so it’s not my problem.’ That’s the easy thing to do. But that thinking doesn’t exist at St. Mike’s.”
St. Michael’s identity as the Urban Angel—the downtown institution caring for the city’s most vulnerable—is something he wants to actively uphold. He says health equity will be among Unity’s four strategic pillars in the near future.
It strikes him profoundly that the donors drawn to St. Mike’s share these same sentiments. When he attends meetings with donors, he says, he finds in each of them “fierce believers”—people who want to press their resources into this hospital’s mission the way one might press stone into mortar.
“It surprises me—and it shouldn’t—that our donors are so deeply driven by our mission,” he says. “There’s a deep commitment among them. They are the key ingredient that makes our hospitals successful. Just like the staff are different because of our roots in our mission and purpose, so are our donors.”
Altaf is grateful for that distinction and is clear-eyed about what it means. “Each gift has an immediate impact—in programs, in services, in equipment,” he says. “And in people’s and families’ lives. That’s what every single dollar does: it changes lives.”
Small fixes for a flawed system
Ask Altaf what a better healthcare system looks like, and he doesn’t describe a hospital. Instead, he describes something that barely exists.
What passes for a health system right now, he theorizes, is a collection of parts that don’t actually work together, and institutions organized around themselves rather than around the people moving through them. The practical failures of that model are not abstract to him, and he insists that by now, a patient ought to be able to carry their entire health record on a card.
“What happens instead is that when someone moves between hospitals, they get asked the same questions all over again,” he says. “The information lives with the institution, not the person.”
The Electronic Patient Record (EPR) system, the integrated records platform Unity has adopted, is a meaningful first step. He calls it a “game-changer,” but is cautious to add that it is a small fix within a system that was never designed with the patient at the centre.
Unity’s Purple Pathways—the emerging work to create seamless transitions across its sites—represent his answer to that problem. Altaf’s ambition is that a patient wouldn't even notice the transition between the three Unity sites.
For him, Providence is the heart of that vision—where someone moves from acute care into the longer work of recovery.
“At Providence, there’s a different kind of intensity,” he says. “It’s a different kind of care. Rehabilitation after a stroke, after losing a limb, after cardiac surgery. It’s the work of getting back to life. And it’s crucial.”
The specialized rehab that Providence delivers is going to be needed more and more, Altaf says. He has known this for a long time, as people live longer, with more complexity,and with more need for personalized care.
“Providence is about the future,” he says. “It’s a very special place to me.”
On the research side, Altaf is equally impatient with long timelines, saying he wants innovation to move from bench to bedside with lightning speed. Angels Den, Canada’s biggest medical research competition, is the example he turns to: where the distance between discovery and impact in a patient’s life is short.
What he describes, the thing that barely exists, is a system organized around the patient: accessible, non-judgmental, continuous across hospitals, and responsive to both present and future needs.
Turning toward each other
Underneath his idealism, Altaf holds a conviction: that real humanity means focusing on someone else.
“Around the world, what we are losing, unfortunately, is our humanity,” he says. “Our ability to relate to one another despite our differences, to find a common good, to put someone else before ourselves, to set self-interest aside long enough to care about someone else’s life.”
Hospitals, at their best, are one of the few places that still require everyone to care about someone else.
“Every person in our hospitals is there because of someone else’s need,” he says, emphasizing that this includes philanthropy.
“That’s what generosity is,” he says. “That’s what giving back is. If we all talked more about someone else, and did more things for others, as opposed to ourselves, we'd have a much better world,” he says.
On some of his most challenging days, Altaf has a habit: he leaves his office and walks the halls of the hospital for at least half an hour to stay close to the small glimpses of humanity around him.
“It helps remind me that moments of joy and moments of sorrow are playing out in every corner of our hospitals hundreds of times each day,” he says. “We change lives. That’s not a trivial thing.”
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