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University Health Network plans to join forces with a rehabilitation institute to help free up beds in Toronto’s largest hospitals, part of an emerging trend as the health-care sector copes with limited financial resources and growing demand.

Toronto Rehabilitation Institute treats patients from Toronto’s largest hospitals, including the three that comprise the University Health Network – St. Michael’s, Mount Sinai and Sunnybrook. Integrating its services will help all of the hospitals move patients more seamlessly and quickly out of their beds and into rehab, said UHN chief executive officer Robert Bell.

“Let’s face it,” he said in an interview. “We know that once you are inside various elements of the Ontario hospital system, you get looked after very well. But the transitions that occur between the domains of the system are very troubling for patients.”

At UHN alone, 50 to 70 patients are waiting for rehab services at any one time, Dr. Bell said. Discharging them more quickly from the hospitals will help ease the bottleneck of patients in emergency departments waiting to get admitted.

UHN is not alone in looking for ways to improve patient care as the province’s 154 hospitals cope with a higher volume of patients from an aging, growing population and as funding fails to keep pace with rising costs.

Two Greater Toronto Area hospitals announced on Thursday that they plan to merge to create a single entity serving the one million residents of Mississauga and West Toronto. Officials at Trillium Health Centre and Credit Valley Hospital say they can provide patients with better quality care by merging. The savings from lower administration costs, including one CEO instead of two, will be invested in front-line services. The population is projected to grow about 20 per cent in the region this decade, they said, placing enormous pressure on health-care providers.

Hospital consolidations are not new in Ontario. Many were merged in the 1990s as part of the Harris government’s massive restructuring of the province’s health-care system. The difference this time around, however, is that hospital executives are the ones initiating the mergers.

A voluntary merger has a far better chance of succeeding, because the people most affected have a say in it, said Janet Davidson, chief executive officer of Trillium. She worked in Alberta in the 1990s when the government merged health-care operators in that province.

“When people feel they have some control over their own destiny in designing it, they take much more ownership of it,” Ms. Davidson said in an interview.

Trillium is itself the product of a merger, but it is widely viewed as one of the more successful ones orchestrated by the Harris government. Trillium has a 714-bed hospital in Mississauga and an out-patient clinic in West Toronto, the former Queensway Hospital.

Credit Valley operates a 382-bed hospital in Mississauga. The two hospitals provide complementary programs, with Trillium focusing on treating heart disease and Credit Valley on cancer.