WEDNESDAY
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May 16, 2012
A division of
Vol. 27 No. 39
COMOX VALLEY RECORD Your community. Your newspaper. www.comoxvalleyrecord.com
TITLE TO TOWHEES WHEES
Vanier’s senior girls are first-time Island rugby champs. ■ 28
EMPIRE DAYS BACK
SPRING FINALLY SPRUNG People took advantage of warm weekend weather to get out for a Walk and Wheel-A-Thon Saturday morning at the Courtenay Airpark. Active Comox Valley sponsored the event. PHOTO BY ERIN HALUSCHAK Empire Days are one of the longestrunning community events in B.C. and are a proud tradition in the life of Cumberland. From its inception the main focus for Empire Days has been celebration of Cumberland’s cultural diversity. Cumberland’s working mining town history is one built on immigration. Encircling downtown Cumberland are former town sites of Chinese, Japanese and African American immigrant workers. ... Complete story on ■ 34
Crew visiting St. Joe’s this week to address issues with pilot project technology Renée Andor
FINDER
Record Staff
■ Weather
2
■ Lottery
6
■ Ferry Schedule
6
■ Classified
23
■ Sports
28
■ Editorial
32
■ Opinion
33
■ Empire Days
Patients frustrated by bedside terminals
34, 35
St. Joseph’s General Hospital patients frustrated by problems with St. Joe’s entertainment and communication technology may feel some relief soon. Health Resource Group (HRG) Inc. installed the equipment for free as a pilot project in fall of 2010. The 160 touch-pad personal access terminals include television, Internet, entertainment such as movies and games, telephone,
a customer satisfaction survey, an option for ordering food with a menu based on the patient’s needs and a call nurse button, which uses a video connection. However, HRG CEO Ken Grant said the system’s had some issues, noting crews were set to come out Tuesday, after the Record’s deadline, to do some work. “We just had a conversation with the CFO (chief financial officer) of the hospital and apprised him of the whole thing,” Grant said Monday. “Our team is going over there tomorrow to stabilize the existing system as it is, and we’ll be doing some upgrades and we’ll be also setting it up for us to be able to move the entire program toward the scalable system that we know will work.”
Grant said part of the problem is when too many patients choose to watch one channel, citing a Canuck hockey game as an example. If the demand on one channel is too high, it will shut down that channel for all users. Bill Stevenson went into St. Joe’s for surgery at the end of April, and was there for nine days. During those days, Stevenson was frustrated by the system. He said the phone option wouldn’t work, only a handful of television channels worked and he couldn’t sign into his e-mail account. When Stevenson tried to check his e-mail, he found there was no option to type an exact website address in. Further, using the Internet browsing options, he was unable to bring up his Shaw
account sign-in page. He noted the movie selection was quite good, but if he accidentally bumped the touch screen during viewing it would go back to the beginning of the movie and the fast forward option was very slow, with only one minute of advances for each tap of the screen. Then, the system shut off completely a few days into Stevenson’s stay and did not come back while he was there. Stevenson also said a man who was sharing the room with him had been in the hospital for a couple of months and the system had been intermittently working the entire time he was there. Grant admitted the system has ... see HRG ■ 2
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