As part of ongoing work to find better and more efficient ways to use our hospital space, VGH will become home to two new units this summer:

• Orthopaedics Unit —Ortho Recon and Ortho Trauma services are consolidating to create this new 42-bed unit on the seventh floor of the Jim Pattison Pavilion Tower (JPP T7);

• General Medicine Unit — This 25-bed unit, including space for subspecialty patients (Leukemia BMT, Endocrinology, Nephrology and Hematology), will be located on JPP T14.

Aligning bed capacity with patient needs

The new units will allow for a re-distribution of beds, ensuring surgery patients are cared for on surgery units, and medicine patients on medicine units.

“About 40 per cent of all beds across Ortho Recon and Ortho Trauma are consistently occupied by off-service medicine patients,” says Andrea Bisaillon, operations director, surgical services, neuro and spine. “This situation doesn’t provide our teams the environment they need to do their best work and provide best care.”

The new General Medicine Unit will ensure medical patients have access to the right care — in the right setting — even during times of surge, thanks to a built-in surge capacity of flex beds. In addition, leukemia bone marrow transplant patients will receive the time-sensitive care they need, when they need it.

“On any given day, we require as many as three additional beds outside the Bone Marrow Transplant Unit to meet patient needs,” explains Leighanne Mackenzie, operations director, medicine. “The new General Medicine Unit will cohort these additional beds to enhance patient flow and care.”

Exploring other opportunities

Other opportunities to align the VGH bed map with patient needs are currently under exploration, and plans to renovate UBC Hospital progress. Recent transfers of Ortho Recon cases to UBCH are important steps forward, and renovations will enable UBCH to expand both its surgical and high acuity capacity to support the transfer of many more surgical cases from VGH in the future.

We expect the new orthopaedics and medicine units at VGH to be operational by July of this year.