An update on the past year

A message from Niagara Health System Board of Trustees Chair Betty-Lou Souter, left, Interim Chief of Staff Dr. Joanna Hope, centre, and Interim President and Chief Executive Officer Dr. Sue Matthews.

People are the heart of healthcare and across the Niagara Health System a great team of compassionate and skilled people care for our patients and their families.

As one hospital, with seven individual sites, our goal is to provide the best possible quality and compassionate care to every patient and to continually seek to improve the way that we do that.

Fiscal 2010-11 was a very active year for the Niagara Health System. Our team of 4,180 employees, 614 physicians, midwives and dentists, and our 1,100 volunteers:

• provided care to approximately 36,000 inpatients;
• treated more than 188,000 patients in our ER and Urgent Care centres;
• conducted more than 35,000 day surgeries;
• provided 247,513 clinic visits;
• performed nearly 383,000 diagnostic tests and completed an amazing 6,393,134 laboratory tests.

Statistics paint only part of the picture. Every admission, treatment or clinic visit we provided last year was for a patient – a person who ranged in age from newborn to more than 100 years of age, the majority of whom live, work and play here in Niagara.

QUALITY: Quality improvement is an ongoing priority for the Niagara Health System to help continually find new and better ways of doing things to enhance care for patients, increase satisfaction and achieve even better clinical outcomes. Our hospital teams are working very hard to enhance quality of care and our patients’ experience. While steady progress is being made to improve our wait times and quality indicators, our hospital recognizes there is always more to do to improve care and service.

In addition to a number of ongoing quality initiatives, Niagara Health developed a Quality Improvement Plan (QIP) that targets specific initiatives in the areas of  safety, effectiveness, access and patient-centredness. Our progress over the coming year will be tracked and reported publicly.

ACHIEVEMENTS: We are proud to report on a number of achievements this past fiscal year including the introduction of new patient programs and services and the receipt of full accreditation status from Accreditation Canada.

As part of the ongoing implementation of the Hospital Improvement Plan (HIP), we introduced a number of new outpatient clinics across our sites. We also introduced the Regional Acute Stroke Unit – a dedicated 10-bed inpatient unit at our Greater Niagara General Site to stabilize stroke patients.

Construction continued on the new healthcare complex in west St. Catharines and our healthcare teams began to plan for the move into the new building.

OUR GRATITUDE: For another consecutive year we received invaluable support from our auxiliaries and foundations and their donors and volunteers. Without the dedication of our auxiliaries and foundations, we would be hard pressed to provide the equipment, facilities and technology our health providers and patients rely on.

We would also like to acknowledge the efforts of the Hamilton Niagara Haldimand Brant Local Health Integration Network and the Province of Ontario in supporting our hospital this past year.

And last but not least, our employees, medical staff and volunteers are to be commended for their continuing efforts to improve on the care and service provided to patients and families. «