While there is still no timeline in place for the complete reopening of Dauphin Regional Health Centre, Prairie Mountain Health CEO Treena Slate was in Dauphin, last week, meeting with engineers and contractors trying to nail down something more definite.
“We’re meeting with our clinical folks, the engineering company, and our construction company, and working on developing a schedule and a set of priorities based on what the clinicians see are the priorities,” Slate said, adding all options are being explored should systems such as HVAC and other infrastructure or medical gases become available.
“So we are hoping for some overarching, high-level timelines or estimates in terms of what the public can expect in the coming months. But with what we know right now, we want to try to plan with what systems we have, so we can open sooner rather than later.”
Slate added some announcements are expected soon around cancer care, hemodialysis and the expansion of lab services to support patient care.
“Around some of the tests that will be offered. That’s important. We want to make sure that we’re supporting physician practice and clinic practice,” Slate said, adding more lab services will also benefit the public in tangible ways.
“Because people are right now having to travel for some of those tests, and we want to limit that as much as we can.”
With the emergency department open and other services increasing, the need to get more support departments up and running is more urgent.
“We are working on also getting some mobile trailers in to support some of the services that are going to be shut down for a long period of time. We’re not going to have a sterilizer for a long period of time. We’re not going to have a pharmacy for a long period of time,” she said.
“So we’re working on getting some mobile supports for those services in, so that we can get things up and running as soon as we can.”
Those services which can be offered, such as emergency medical services, have been operating well and have been busy, Slate added.
“The volume, the number of patients we’re seeing in the Dauphin emergency room, are pretty close to what we normally saw in the Dauphin emergency room. So that’s a good sign that people are accessing that service,” Slate said, adding PMH is constantly looking to tweak operations to make things more streamlined.
(The ER) has actually been working okay. I mean, it’s not the same as it always was, so we’re working on improving accessibility to spaces in the emergency department. Those are things that we can expand sooner rather than later in the emergency department to get it a little bit more functional and accessible.”
From the beginning, much of the remediation work has focussed on the hospital’s crawl space, which houses many of the mechanical systems and was completely filled with silt from the flood waters. Meaningful progress on that work has been made, Slate said.
“They’ve done a tremendous job of cleaning out that silt. After that’s cleaned out, they still have to do soil testing and some remediation work in there, and then they can at least get at some of the infrastructure to start replacing it and get working on that,” she said.
“It’s not completely done, but they’ve made really good progress on it.”
Throughout it all, feedback has been positive, Slate said, from the public and from PMH staff.
Patients and staff are pleased things are getting closer “normal” and ensuring critical services such as cancer care and hemodialysis back close to home before the snow flies is really key, she said.
“The staff that can be home and working, I think are, for the most part, happier to be here. But really, everybody wants everything back up and running just as it was. We want that, too, of course,” Slate said.
“We just have to work with the project teams on getting things done as soon as we can, and making sure that the clinicians and the frontline staff are involved in that planning, so that they can inform what makes sense in terms of their workflows and providing the most appropriate care for patients.”