Somewhere in a kitchen drawer in North Toronto there is an envelope with a date on it. Surgery day. The date might be six weeks out or four months out, and once it is written on the calendar the waiting begins. That waiting time almost always goes to the operation itself: the anaesthetic, the surgeon, the questions nobody wants to ask out loud. Very little of it goes to the house the patient will come back to, which is where the recovery actually happens.
This is an independent going home resource from Bedford Medical Alert®, written for patients and families of Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. Bedford has no relationship with Sunnybrook. This is not hospital material, and nothing here is medical advice; the clinical side of discharge belongs entirely to the care team. What follows is the other side of it, the household side, from a Canadian monitoring company that fields a lot of calls from families in the first week home.
Sunnybrook is unusual in how often it hands a family that envelope.
The Holland Centre at 43 Wellesley St. East is the Sunnybrook site built around bone and joint care. On its own Holland Bone & Joint Program page, Sunnybrook reports 5,440 or more orthopaedic surgical procedures in 2022/23 and more than 49,000 ambulatory visits in the same year, with total joint replacement listed among the program’s specialties. Sunnybrook also describes leading a collaboration with other Toronto-area hospitals that created an additional 1,335 surgical cases a year to cut hip and knee wait times.
Underneath those numbers sits something families can use. An elective hip or knee replacement is one of the few hospital admissions that arrives with a date attached, which means the preparation window opens long before the admission does.
So use it. Order and fit the equipment while the person can still stand comfortably to be measured. Book whatever help is coming for the first fortnight. Move the things that live on high shelves down to waist height. And if a monitoring service is part of the plan, get it installed and tested weeks ahead rather than ordering it from a hospital parking lot on discharge day. We would far rather the first time someone presses their pendant be a practice call, on a quiet Tuesday afternoon, with a family member standing beside them.
Have a surgery date and want the monitoring sorted before it arrives? Call Bedford at 1-888-755-3055. We will walk through the house layout with you, explain exactly what happens when the button is pressed, and set the response plan up with the family names and instructions you want on file. Easy Setup, and the equipment is included with the service.
In the calls our team takes after a joint replacement, the room that comes up first is the bathroom, followed closely by the stretch of floor between the bed and that bathroom at three in the morning. The Holland program describes its own team approach as focused on patients’ “function and independence, patient-centred care, aging, and quality of life after care.” Every word of that gets tested at home, in the dark, without a physiotherapist in the room.
Walk the route before the admission, at night, with the lights the patient will actually be using. Doorways and the turn into the bathroom need clearance for a walker, which usually means a rug goes, a laundry basket finds a new home, and the door that always swings half shut gets a hook. Our page on bathroom safety for seniors covers the fixtures worth adding, and a raised seat and a well-anchored grab bar are worth more in the first month than almost anything else you could buy.
One thing worth settling in advance: who sleeps in the house the first two nights, and what the plan is if nobody can.
Not every Sunnybrook homecoming comes with an envelope. Sunnybrook describes itself as home to Canada’s largest trauma centre across its three campuses, and the Bayview Campus at 2075 Bayview Ave is one of them. Of those 5,440 orthopaedic procedures in 2022/23, Sunnybrook reports more than 1,400 were orthopaedic trauma cases. Those admissions begin with a phone call, not a calendar entry.
If that is the situation you are in, the preparation window is measured in hours and the list has to shrink to what fits in one afternoon. Our general coming home from the hospital checklist is written for exactly that compressed version, and it is the better starting point than this page if discharge is tomorrow.
For some patients the route home runs through Cummer Avenue. Sunnybrook’s St. John’s Rehab at 285 Cummer Avenue is, by Sunnybrook’s own account, Canada’s first and Ontario’s only dedicated burn rehabilitation program, and its program page reports 2,575 inpatient admissions and 2,508 outpatient admissions across its programs for FY 2024-25.
A rehab stay changes the shape of the discharge conversation. The patient leaves stronger and better rehearsed, having practised stairs and transfers with a therapist watching. The household, meanwhile, has had weeks to settle into a routine that does not include them. It is worth asking the rehab team a blunt question before the last day: what can this person safely do alone, and what should never be attempted without someone in the room.
There is a stretch of recovery that no service covers well. The home care visits have tapered, the outpatient appointments have finished, and the person is mobile enough to be left alone but not yet steady enough that anyone feels relaxed about it. That gap is the reason a lot of families call us.
Bedford’s Home Freedom system is a pendant and a base unit, built for someone recovering inside their own home. Press the button and a Canadian monitoring centre answers, follows the response protocol that particular family set up, and works down the contact list in the order they chose. It is not a generic script; the protocol is written per household, which matters more than people expect at two in the morning. Our page on what happens when you press a medical alert button walks the whole sequence.
Some pendants also offer automatic fall detection, which works by looking for the motion pattern of a fall in general terms. Treat it as a backup: no system detects every fall, and the button stays the primary way to call for help. Our explainer on how automatic fall detection works is deliberately plain about the limits. Where a pendant simply will not be worn, Silver Shield takes a different route, using a wall-mounted radar sensor with no camera and nothing to wear, alerting the family directly under protocols the family sets rather than routing to a Bedford operator.
Practically: equipment is included with the service, plans run month to month or annually with a three month minimum at the start, and there are no cancellation fees, so a recovery that finishes early is not a problem. Bedford services are funded or approved under a range of third-party programs for those who qualify, though we cannot take on the application paperwork for you.
Bedford Medical Alert is a Canadian-owned monitoring company with a 4.9-star Google rating, a member of the Ontario Community Support Association, trusted by clinicians across Canada, and it brings three generations of experience. Bedford has supported hospital education programs and research initiatives from UHN Toronto Rehab to Trillium Health.
Sunnybrook is not on that list. This page was written by Bedford, not by Sunnybrook, and nothing in it should be read as partnership, affiliation or endorsement. Sunnybrook publishes its own patient information, including a Going Home section under Getting Admitted to Hospital on sunnybrook.ca, and the unit or clinic can give you the material specific to the procedure. Read theirs first. This one is about the house.
The boring work is what pays off. Measure the doorway. Move the rug. Make the test call. Write down who to phone at two in the morning and stick it on the fridge where a paramedic could read it. None of that needs a specialist, and none of it needs to wait until discharge day, because all of it is possible in the weeks while that envelope sits in the drawer.
If someone in your family is heading home from Sunnybrook and will be on their own part of the day, look at Bedford Home Freedom, our in-home pendant and base system with 24/7 Canadian monitoring. Call 1-888-755-3055 and we will set it up before the discharge date, not after it.
