From a black Lab to strategy, CMH is all about joy

Kim Mosgrove has been a registered nurse at Cambridge Memorial Hospital (CMH) in Cambridge for 26 years. Many of them she spent in obstetrics, with the last six in the special care nursery for sick babies. In recent years, Ember, the hospital’s staff facility dog, has truly brightened her life.

“I absolutely adore Ember,” Mosgrove says. “She is the gentlest dog and has the most soulful eyes. I love when she comes around. She just brings so much joy to everybody.”

A staff member approached the hospital’s senior team in 2019 with the idea of a staff facility dog. Hospital work is stressful, just like the police or fire services. No hospital had applied to National Service Dogs for its own canine, but CMH did. It takes two years to train a service dog, and in 2022, Ember, a black Labrador retriever, joined the hospital as a full-time staff member.

Ember works an eight-hour shift making regular rounds, or can be called out for any trauma. She only works with staff, not patients. Other agencies bring in animals for patients.

“Ember is trained with canine intervention and she has four or five cues she does. If the command is ‘chin,’ you put your hands out and she drops her head into your hands and you stroke her head,” says president and CEO Patrick Gaskin. “It’s really meant to help reduce stress hormones for the staff because it truly gives them a positive experience.

“Ember is a great addition to the hospital and she’s been called on by staff, our physicians, our midwives and our volunteers.”

Mosgrove’s special care nursery also cares for premature babies. Full-term babies are 40 weeks, and the nursery can care for any babies born 32 weeks and above.

“If we have a crisis, we can call for Ember to comfort somebody in distress, or if you’ve had a really bad shift sometimes Ember will come,” Mosgrove says. “When she comes around it just lifts the mood for the rest of the day. Ember brings so much joy to everyone. We just love her.”

Gaskin notes that the hospital has a number of councils but the first, and a guiding council, is the employee engagement council formed in 2017.

“We have a strong focus on creating joy at work,” says Gaskin. “We’re deliberate about our use of joy in our strategic pillars, and our promoters of joy are definitely the members of our employee engagement council. We create an environment that promotes joy. The council has used joy to shape a new way for employee-manager one-on-one review conversations.

“The manager celebrates how the employee is contributing to the department or unit. They talk about goals achieved. They make a plan and set a goal for the upcoming year. They are really collaborative, supportive conversations. If a staff member is afraid of the performance review with the manager, instead we’ve made it an engaging positive experience.”

The hospital, with 1,300 employees, has also established a diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) council, an Indigenous council and an accessibility council.

The DEI council has helped senior staff ensure language in job postings is inclusive and helped educate how to celebrate diversity and recognize important days or weeks through the calendar year. The Indigenous council has worked on a plan for the hospital’s approach to reconciliation. That plan includes educating the leaders and working with select clinical programs on how to better provide Indigenous care.

The accessibility council looks at physical barriers but also websites and language. Through video translation, the hospital offers 80 languages, including American Sign Language.

“We have really active councils,” Gaskin says – with joy.

This article appeared in the magazine announcing this year's Waterloo Area’s Top Employers winners, published January 14, 2025 in The Waterloo Record. This article was prepared with the financial support of the employer, which reviewed but did not write its contents.