Tucked away in CP5 is a specialized unit that cares for frail seniors with complex medical, cognitive, psychiatric and/or social issues. The Short Term Assessment and Treatment (STAT) Centre, is operated by Vancouver Community and is composed of a Day Hospital and 17 bed in-patient unit.

“STAT has been highly successful in treating this complex patient population,” said Laura Case, Executive Director, Vancouver Community. “Both the day program and inpatient program are an invaluable resource that we will continue to support. We are adjusting operations to ensure that we can serve as many people as possible with a variety of Day Hospital services and clinical options within existing budgets.”

What is the new model of care?

To do this, a new model of care will be introduced to STAT in April.

Currently the Day Hospital offers five days of programming between the hours of 9:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. In the new Day Hospital model, the program will run three-days-a-week. The two remaining days of service will become Clinic Days.

Clinic Days will be attended by clients who are not in need of all the services offered in the full Day Hospital setting or whose medical, cognitive or psychiatric issues make it difficult or impossible for them to attend the full program with others. This change will allow STAT to treat more clients with the level of service that they require.

“These changes will allow STAT to serve more clients while achieving similar patient outcomes of reduced ER visits, hospitalizations and admissions to residential care,” said Dr. Rolando Barrios, Senior Medical Director, Vancouver Community.

Additionally, the changes to STAT will allow for increased support of the successful Home Vive program. Together, these changes will enable Vancouver Community to help frail, homebound elderly people live in their own homes safely and for longer periods of time.

How does this impact STAT staff?

However, changes such as these – regardless of their benefit to clients — often come with staff impacts attached. This one is no different. STAT’s care model redesign will result in two displacements due to reduced hours of work, and another 2.5 FTE will be deleted through retirements.

“This redesign will impact all STAT staff in some way,” said Janice Lochbaum, Director, Home Health, Vancouver Community. “Unfortunately, there is a small number of valuable staff for whom these changes will have a direct impact, and I’d like to thank them publicly for their dedication and service to this challenging client group.”

STAT’s new care model arose from an external review of the STAT Centre which was conducted last summer.