BC Children's Hospital Opens Two Renovated and Redesigned In-Patient Units

November 4, 2005

VANCOUVER – Sick children, their families and care providers at BC Children’s Hospital are the beneficiaries of today’s opening of two renovated and redesigned in-patient units, Premier Gordon Campbell announced today.

“We all want B.C. patients to get the best possible care when they need it, and that’s especially true when it comes to sick children,” Campbell said. “This $6.9-million investment is the first substantial modernization to these two units since the hospital opened in 1982. It’s a significant upgrade that enables BC Children’s Hospital and its dedicated staff to provide safer, more efficient patient care for children and youth from communities across our province.”

The focus of the improvements was updating patient rooms, amenities for families as well as the working environment for staff, physicians, and the medical and health trainees through structural renovation and the addition of new technology.

“Children’s Hospital cares for the sickest kids and teens across B.C., so it’s critical that we keep pace in order to meet the changing and increasingly complex needs of our patients,” said Sharon Toohey, president of BC Children’s Hospital and an executive of the Provincial Health Services Authority. “Our renovations make the hospital experience more comfortable for children and their families and improvements to our infrastructure will enable us to adopt new technologies as they become available.”

The two in-patient units, 3R and 3M, combined can provide care for up to sixty patients with cardiac, neuroscience, post-surgical or other types of needs. Renovations maintained overall patient capacity but now most patients will have their own private room.

Improvements to in-patient rooms include:

• Remote monitoring of patients and infrastructure to support a planned computerized clinical information system.
• Patient lifts for 10 rooms.
• Intensive video monitoring of children being assessed for seizures in two rooms.
• Anterooms, for health-care provider washing, gowning and gloving, to enable an even higher level of infection control for patients requiring more extensive isolation in four in-patient rooms.
• New equipment storage for almost all of the rooms.
• A new, state-of-the-art wireless nurse call system, reducing the number of audible chimes heard by patients and families, while improving nurses’ ability to monitor and respond to patients’ needs.
• Consolidation of what had been four in-patient units into two modern units, providing more flexibility for nursing resources.

New amenities for patient families, which were developed in consultation with the hospital’s Partners in Care parent advisory committee, include shower facilities, updated quiet rooms and an improved Family Resource Library satellite with two private computer kiosks offering Internet access for conducting research and staying touch with family and friends.

Improvements for staff and physicians include more computers and built-to-suit workstations, as well as additional private workspaces. In order to support the hospital’s clinical teaching mandate, dedicated space for health care students and medical trainees were also incorporated into the redesign.

The renovation of these in-patient units is the latest in a series of capital projects – more than $50 million over a three-year period – that are modernizing the campus of care at BC Children’s Hospital and BC Women’s Hospital & Health Centre.