HEALTH-CARE SERVICES ENHANCED ACROSS FRASER HEALTH

BURNABY – Patients in the province’s fastest-growing health authority will benefit from a number of strategies to increase capacity and improve services at several hospitals and health-care facilities, representatives from the provincial government and Fraser Health announced today.

“Acute care, emergency, geriatric, psychiatric and rehabilitation services will be improved at health-care facilities across Fraser Health with the implementation of these initiatives,” said Health Services Minister George Abbott. “Fraser Health will add more than 60 beds, improve procedures, and expand departments to build greater capacity and efficiency. I would like to congratulate the team at Fraser Health who have worked to put this plan together.”

More than 60 recommendations, including the opening of 50 acute care and 19 residential care beds in Burnaby, Surrey, Maple Ridge and Langley, will help to address pressures posed by a growing and aging population and rising demand for health care.

The initiatives range from speeding up diagnosis and treatment by expanding space and health-care resources at the emergency department at Royal Columbian Hospital, Burnaby Hospital, Eagle Ridge Hospital, Langley Memorial Hospital, and Surrey Memorial Hospital, to strengthening geriatric care and outpatient therapy for seniors and adding psychiatric beds throughout Fraser Health.

The Integrated Management Planning and Action Task Force (IMPACT) was a Fraser Health team that worked with many executives, leaders, employees and physicians over the last few months to devise solutions to the challenges of delivering excellent and cost-effective health care to an aging and growing population.

“We are initially investing $7 million this year to implement these recommendations over the next 15 months and I am confident that we will achieve the desired results since each strategy has defined, evidence-based, measurable outcomes,” said Dr. Nigel Murray, Fraser Health’s president and CEO. “These outcomes will not only benefit the patients in our hospitals, the residents in our care facilities and clients in community settings but also enhance the working conditions for our employees and care providers.”

Fraser Health established IMPACT to engage health professionals in the health authority to develop strategies to address the increasing demand for acute care services. The initiatives fall under three main goals:

Redesigning clinical and diagnostic processes to gain better flow and quality of care;
Investing to improve capacity and quality to bring short term relief of demand pressures; and
Investing to improve capacity over the medium and long term.

IMPACT is a component of the overall strategy to build capacity throughout Fraser Health, improving access for patients and ensuring sustainability for the years ahead. This includes the new Abbotsford Regional Hospital and Cancer Centre which opened in August 2008, improvements to the emergency department at Burnaby Hospital, the start of construction for the first-ever Outpatient Hospital in Fraser Health, more than 1,600 net-new seniors beds and units across the region and an additional 73 acute care beds at Surrey Memorial Hospital.

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Contact:

Michelle Stewart

Communications Director

Ministry of Health Services

250 952-1889 (media line)

250 852-5571 (cell)

Fraser Health Media Pager

604 450-7881

1 backgrounder(s) attached.


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