Help us build the future of

healthcare Women Deserve.

Healthcare wasn’t built for women. For generations, women’s bodies were excluded from the data that shaped medicine. So we started asking the questions medicine had missed.

Today, Canada stands at another defining moment.

Women are living longer, but not healthier. They spend more years in poor health than men and continue to face delays in diagnosis, gaps in research and inequities in care.

These gaps will not close on their own.

With your support, we can shape a healthier future for women and for everyone.

Women weren’t included in clinical medical trials until
0
Of all research funding, women’s health receives just
0 %
Closing the women’s health gap could add to Canada’s economy up to
$ 0 B

This is not a future we should accept.

Invest in Women’s College Hospital and help build a future where the people you love receive better care.

Building What Comes Next

Building the future isn’t about one breakthrough. It’s about transforming healthcare at every level.

At Women’s College Hospital, that means redesigning how care is delivered, rewriting what medicine knows and reimagining the systems that shape people’s lives.

Redesign

Women have spent generations trying to fit into a healthcare system that was never designed around their bodies, needs or lives. We’re building a new standard of care across women’s cancers, mental health and cardiac care, connecting research directly to treatment, so discoveries reach patients sooner.

Rewrite

Every treatment rests on evidence. Yet for most of medical history, that evidence was written without women in it. We’re creating the evidence medicine skipped and investing in the researchers who will write what comes next.

Reimagine

The system we inherited was built to treat illness after it appears, one condition at a time, around a standard male patient. We’re building new models of care for the conditions women face and creating better ways to deliver that care to more people.

We’ve Always Built What Comes Next

Our history proves what happens when we challenge the status quo.

When women were excluded, we opened doors. When medicine missed the evidence, we created it.

When better care didn’t exist, we built it.

Again and again, what started here has helped move healthcare forward.

Our history is proof of what is possible when people challenge the status quo and build what comes next.

1867

Dr. Emily Stowe becomes Canada's first woman doctor.

1883

Dr. Emily Stowe helps establish Woman's Medical College in Toronto, opening doors to medical education to women for the first time.

1911

The first hospital opens at 18 Seaton Street with seven inpatient beds. Women's College Hospital becomes Canada's first hospital run by women doctors.

1915

Women's College Hospital and Dispensary officially opens at 125 Rusholme Road.

1935

Women’s College Hospital opens its new home at 76 Grenville Street, expanding access to healthcare for women with space for 140 inpatients. 

1947

Dr. Marion Hilliard and Dr. Eva Mader Macdonald collaborate on developing a simplified Pap Test for detecting early signs of cancer.

1948

Ontario's first cancer detection clinic for "well women" opens, pioneering early cancer screening.

1961

Women’s College Hospital becomes a fully accredited teaching hospital affiliated with the University of Toronto.

1963

Women’s became the first hospital in Ontario to use mammography for breast cancer detection.

1971

Canada's first Perinatal Intensive Care Unit opens at Women’s College Hospital, along with the Family Practice Health Centre, then the largest in Toronto.

1973

The Bay Centre for Birth Control opens. Dr. Marion Powell becomes its director in 1981.

1996

Women’s opens Canada's first cardiac prevention and rehabilitation program designed exclusively for women.

1996

Dr. Steven Narod and researchers at Women’s College Hospital help advance understanding of BRCA1 and BRCA2, helping reshape how hereditary breast and ovarian cancer risk is understood and managed.

2006

Women’s College Hospital begins operating independently under the Public Hospitals Act and the Women's College Research Institute formally launches.

2007

Planning begins for the redevelopment of Women’s College Hospital. 

2011

Crossroads Clinic opens, Toronto's first hospital-based refugee health clinic.

2013

The Institute for Health System Solutions and Virtual Care opens. (WIHV).

2015

The new home of Women's College Hospital is completed.

2018

Women’s begins offering same-day joint replacement surgery in an outpatient setting, the first program of its kind in Canada.

2019

Women's Virtual launches at WCH, Canada's first virtual hospital.

2020

Ganawishkadawe - Centre for Wise Practices in Indigenous Health officially opens, Ontario's first hospital-based centre developing a strategy to incorporate traditional and inclusive Indigenous practices into non-Indigenous healthcare spaces.

2021

Women's Age Lab opens, the world's first and only centre dedicated to addressing the health inequities faced by older women. 

2026

Women's College Hospital launches Canada's first Centre for Sex and Gender in Health.