We’re calling on your expertise
Every day, we are inspired by the extraordinary courage and dedication we see in the Vancouver community of care. When people are in need of health care services, they look to you, and together you provide compassionate, quality care. However, we know that you face challenges and barriers to delivering the best care possible, and we need to improve that.
What if…it was easy to do the right thing, and care for our patients and clients the way we would want to be cared for?
In order to find new solutions, we need your help. Please read today’s announcement from Mary Ackenhusen about the organization-wide My VCH survey coming on September 25.
The Vancouver perspective will be critical for successful change. Make sure you have your say.
Laura Case and Vivian Eliopoulos
VCH-Vancouver, Chief Operating Officers
Mary Ackenhusen, CEO
Thanks for the question – as you’ve noted, every community of care has a COO, and Vancouver has two due to its size. So there is one COO for Richmond, one for Coastal (north shore and rural) and one each for Vancouver Acute and Vancouver Community. Why are we organized this way? I believe strongly in local presence. I don’t believe bigger is better or that centralizing control and resources makes for better service or better controls. We know that when leaders or organizations get too far away from the “customer”, they can become unresponsive and that gets in the way of good care. I want local communities to know their leader – each COO is the CEO of their community and should be visible to staff, physicians and community groups/leaders. The COO structure also helps to optimize our system across the community. With this structure, it is relatively easy to move resources from acute to community and follow the patient, while if it was centralized at the corporate VCH level, I don’t think it would happen in an effective way. I’ve worked in different models at Fraser Health and VCH, and have found the geographic model that we maintain at VCH to do a better job of making a big organization responsive to community, staff and patient needs.
forston tylor, RN
How is VCH structured so that there is a CEO, two COO’s and another COO for VCH on the north shore? This is not an attempt to be confrontational, but to better understand how leadership of this large organization functions. I also understand that this is not the best venue for this question but cannot think of any other place to raise it.
Thank you