When it comes to the never-ending facility and building issues that pop up around VCH Community sites, staff are now going to have a single-point-of-contact resource to contact when they need help.

The LMFM (Lower Mainland Facilities Management) Real Estate Leasing & Property Management team is pleased to announce that we will be providing an improved Property Management (PM) service delivery model for the close to 100 VCH Corporate and Community leased sites starting June 1, 2014.

“This new model is about adopting best practices to allow our staff to focus on providing health care,” says Laura Case, chief operating officer of Vancouver Community for VCH. “It’s going to let clinical staff focus on clinical issues and facility staff to focus on facility issues.”

The Real Estate team has been working toward the goal of providing a standardized PM service delivery model across the VCH community portfolio for some time. This initiative enables the Real Estate team to provide advanced ‘best practice’ facility management and maintenance services to VCH lease sites (excluding SSBC and FMO supported sites) – which allows Health Care Administration and Clinical staff to look after their core business – patient care and program/clinical management.

Increased efficiency

Robert Guenther, director of Real Estate, Leasing & Property Management says the service will take pressures off of clinical staff who have been relied upon for such things as having  confirm if plumbing and construction projects were completed properly.

“And now we’re going to be doing that,” he says. “It’s going to make things much more efficient.”

New call centre

A single service intake point for lease premises via a web interface and a 24/7 Call Centre with a single 800 number (1-855-759-6310) will be implemented to expedite phone and online requests for maintenance repairs, security & access, parking, emergency, operational items and project services – creating improvements in response times, minimizing disruption to core program functions and providing enhanced work request tracking functions.

“In some cases staff used to have to call the contractors themselves about certain issues like if the roof was leaking or a pipe was broken,” Robert says. “This call centre will now handle all of these issues.”

New website for work requests

Links to the new web page for entering work requests will be clearly identified on the FMO maintenance request page (http://fmo/). Those currently familiar with sending a request via the current Maximo work request page will find the entry process straight forward. Training will be provided on request to those needing it.

A site administration contact and a back-up will still be required to initiate service requests for a site. However, a number of the facility-related site tasks currently handled by site administrators, such as contacting VCH light techs, assessing site issues, engaging and following up on contractors, contacting landlords and overseeing site work, will now be directly managed by Property Management, the light technicians or landlords. There will, of course, be a transition period as tasks are migrated to the new process.

The Real Estate team will be visiting a number of sites prior to June 1 to introduce the new service request process and the individuals that will work directly with the site administrators and coordinators. The remaining sites will be visited in the following month.