Town of Smithers
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TOWN OF SMITHERS Condensed Questions and Answers of the Public Meeting of Health Services – Bulkley Valley District Hospital held in the Ferguson Room, Hudson Bay Lodge, 3251 Highway 16, Smithers, B.C., on Tuesday, March 2, 2004, at 5:30 p.m. Council Present: Staff Present: Jim Davidson, Mayor Wallace Mah, Corporate Administrator/CAO Norm Adomeit, Councillor Jason Llewellyn, DCAO Cathryn Bucher, Councillor James Warren, Corporate Administrative Assistant Cress Farrow, Councillor Leslie Ford, Financial Administrator/Collector Bill Goodacre, Councillor Mark Allen, Director of Development Services Andy Howard, Councillor Les Schumacher, Fire Chief Marilyn Stewart, Councillor. Penny Goodacre, Recording Secretary. Panel Representatives Present: Linda Mangnall, Moderator Malcolm Maxwell, CEO, Northern Health Authority Dr. David Butcher, VP Medicine, Northern Health Authority Debbie Tennant, Medical Laboratory Technologist, Bulkley Valley District Hospital Ron Miller, Manager of Laboratory and X-Ray Services, Bulkley Valley District Hospital Cor van der Meulen, Casual X-Ray Technician, Bulkley Valley District Hospital Dr. Lothar Schaefer, Anesthetist, Bulkley Valley District Hospital. Media Present: C. Lester, BVLD, and M. Pearson/H. Ramsey, The Interior News. Public Present: 753 signatures, attached to and forming part of these minutes. There was an estimated 800 people present, although not all were given the opportunity to sign in. SESSION #1 QUESTION AND ANSWER PERIOD 1. Mayor Sharon Hartwell, Village of Telkwa: I and everyone else here want to know what is going to happen to the lab. I sit on the Northwest Regional Hospital District and we signed a “Memorandum of Understanding (MOU)” along with the NHA and other five in the area, and some of the concerns we had in no particular order: funding, moving of equipment, moving of services. We were very opposed to that and we have all those things in the MOU and here we stand tonight. The BVDH is important to all of us in the region and unfortunately Mayor Smith had to leave, she couldn’t put her comments forward. We’re still concerned about 24/7 health care. I’m just here to say I am very distressed at the comments and very disappointed. 2. Mark Adamson, Smithers: My concern is that we are really good at producing babies here and without a surgeon on call, my understanding is there are no deliveries allowed. So if we don’t have a surgeon here all the time, people have to go to other cities to have their babies; which is totally unreasonable. So that is a problem. Notes of the Public Meeting of Health Services – Bulkley Valley District Hospital held in the Ferguson Room, Hudson Bay Lodge, 3251 Highway 16, Smithers, B.C., on Tuesday, March 2, 2004, at 5:30 p.m. Page 2 Another comment, as a society, where the governments made the decision to not be in debt, which I totally support, and to have a balanced budget. And yet, as a society, all we ever do is complain about cuts. You know we are cutting funding for hospitals, highways you name it. But the real problem is: are we willing to pay more taxes to support our hospital? And you have a difficult position, I don’t envy you because you’re given a dollar amount and you have to balance that budget. But maybe as a society we need to look and say “okay, hey let’s all pay a little more taxes if it is directed to a certain place”. So just a comment that we are a very complaining society. Response by Malcolm Maxwell, NHA: I would like to respond, just quickly to the question about obstetrics. But basically, there are quite a number of family physicians and I would ask Dr. Moisey to help me with this. There are quite a number of family physicians who provide obstetrical care, who also have special training in doing c-sections. That is one specific area of surgery. So the problem that can arise though, if the hospital doesn’t have any other surgical activities going on, then the physicians who provide anesthesia don’t have enough chance either, it ceases to become worthwhile for them to continue to provide anesthesia. And they also don’t get a lot of skilled practice at doing it. So it is important to keep, if you are doing a lot of c-sections in a hospital, even if you have the family physicians doing the sections, you need some surgical activity around, so that you have doctors doing the anesthesia side as well, so that when a lady needs a c-section in a hurry, you have both the G.P. surgeon and the anesthetist to provide that. 3. Brian Northup, Smithers: I would like you to take a message back to your Board, who, I am a little disappointed are not here this evening. You’re undertaking heart surgery to our community. And I believe you that you are trying to do that heart surgery without anesthetic or giving us anesthetic, and kind of hoping that we were asleep. We expect the NHA to lay their cards on the table, tell us what they are going to do, for and with our community and outline that plan thoroughly. Because that has not happened since the inception of the NHA. And when I was on Council, we asked for representation from the NHA and poor Paul Vieira was the only spokesman who attended. We want answers to our questions and we want a clear path of the future for our hospital, it’s our heart. Response by Malcolm Maxwell, NHA: Notes of the Public Meeting of Health Services – Bulkley Valley District Hospital held in the Ferguson Room, Hudson Bay Lodge, 3251 Highway 16, Smithers, B.C., on Tuesday, March 2, 2004, at 5:30 p.m. Page 3 Let me give you the 30 second version of that, because that is fundamentally why I came tonight. And maybe I had too much presentation material. So here is the 30 second version of the future of the BVDH: The BVDH will continue to provide in-patient care for acutely ill people in this community. It will continue to have a radiology service. It will have expanded equipment so that if your radiologist is away or needs to get an image somewhere else, you will have modern technology to do that. It will have expanded skills in obstetrics and surgery in trauma support of your nursing staff, and you have a good nursing staff. You got an old, ugly, scrappy building and I honestly don’t know what to do about it. Because I don’t have enough money coming at me to replace all the old hospitals in northern B.C. but clearly some improvements are needed. I terms of emergency care, we absolutely must have a 24 hour emergency department in a hospital for a community of this size. So all of those things are fundamental to our planning for the future. And Paul, and Suzanne Johnston and David and I, will all be happy to speak to Council or the Health Watch Committee on that. There are many other pieces that I don’t know four years from now which might be the best computer system to buy. But in terms of providing the patient services, medical coverage and the range of care at the hospital, we don’t see a big change from what we see today. Unless we are able to expand some things with more visiting surgeons than we are seeing right now. Okay? My point with respect to the building is simply that I would like to see the patients, the nurses, the physicians, and all the staff that work there every day have something that wasn’t built 45 years ago. The way we do things today is a lot different then how we ran hospital services a long time ago. So what we hear now is staff, trying to work in the emergency department that doesn’t meet their needs as well as it should. I wish we could fix that. With respect to the lab services, hematology and clinical chemistry, all of the services that are required to respond to a physician’s need for information about a patient within 24 hours will be provided in your hospital. There are some microbiology tests that take 2, 3, 4 days to turn around. We will choose the solution for those tests with the following things: with your medical staff, with the pathologist, provides results that meet their needs to provide the best care for the patient. That provide the best result in terms of accuracy, I don’t want the tests to be right 85% of the time if I can have it right 98% of the time. That does incur a cost, cause you can’t ignore it completely, but the first two items will be dealt with first. 4. Phil LePage, Smithers: I have a whole pile of questions, but given the line up, I’ll keep it to just one. Mr. Maxwell you have a slide that shows you anticipate 15-20% more hospital Notes of the Public Meeting of Health Services – Bulkley Valley District Hospital held in the Ferguson Room, Hudson Bay Lodge, 3251 Highway 16, Smithers, B.C., on Tuesday, March 2, 2004, at 5:30 p.m. Page 4 care visits in the north. I would like you to take that to Gordon Campbell and show him, that as a result of that, we need 15-20% more funding in the north, not 15-20% more cuts. You cannot balance your budget by cutting the guts out of the north.