2007
Making Surgical Minutes a Milestone Dr. William Cole, the Chief of Pediatric Surgery at the Stollery Children’s Hospital, is enthusiastic about the role the hospital is playing as an inaugural member of the Canadian Pediatric Surgical Wait Times Project (CPSWTP), which has seen improved wait times and outcomes for children needing scheduled surgery. “It’s a way of creating order out of what otherwise could be chaos,” says Dr. Cole, describing the scheduling system developed by the Wait Times project.
13
The next step in the wait time strategy at the Stollery is to implement a monitoring system for emergency work, similar to that used for scheduled surgeries. Dr. Cole feels that a dedicated daytime emergency operating room is necessary, “The practical problem is how do you actually do that (currently) without interrupting the patient schedule for the day and increasing the wait list for the patients waiting for scheduled surgery? We’re now in the happy situation that with redeveloping the operating rooms we have the capacity to build in an emergency operating room that can be used during the day. That’s a fortunate situation.” The opening of the dedicated pediatric surgical suite was a first, giant step toward giving children who need surgery the appropriate, timely, child focused and family centred care that is the hallmark of the Stollery Children’s Hospital. The development of the surgery clinics, including plaster room and urodynamic suite, and the comprehensive organization provided by the Canadian Pediatric Wait Times project – both supported by the Stollery Children’s Hospital Foundation – made 2007 a significant milestone in the Stollery’s first ten years.
Dr. William Cole