Our new Christchurch Outpatients facility is open for business.
New Outpatients now open
Just over two years since the soil-turning and blessing that marked the start of construction, our new Christchurch Outpatients facility is open for business. With nearly 400,000 outpatient visits across more than 27 services over a year, this will be a busy facility. Small teams of people working in the DHB have lived and breathed a vision of our new facilities for close to five years. First they helped us deliver Burwood Hospital two years ago, and in October they did everything necessary so we could finally open the doors of the new Christchurch Outpatients to eager staff and patients. Seven years after the Canterbury quakes forced many of our outpatient services into temporary accommodation, we now have a facility that is fit for purpose. Three principles have underpinned the Canterbury DHB outpatient care model. These are: PATIENT-CENTRED – a patientcentred model of outpatient care aims to provide timely, planned and well communicated health care with minimal wait. We can achieve this through streamlining and standardising our referral, booking and scheduling systems around the needs of our patients. MULTIDISCIPLINARY AND COLLABORATIVE – this includes developing nurse-led and Allied Health-
Co-location of services makes it possible to be efficient through not duplicating equipment, services, or resources. led clinics and nurse practitioner roles, among others. It also sees us work closer with community-based care providers including General Practice teams, and strengthening our models of care to look after our patients along every step of their health journey. ACCESSIBLE – as we face increasing demands from our ageing population we want to make sure our services are accessible. The aim is to provide a co-ordinated system that will allow
people greater choice and flexibility in accessing health services. In effect, it’s a one-stop-shop philosophy. In our new building, this thinking is at the heart of this facility, demonstrated by the co-location of services. This makes it possible to be efficient through not duplicating equipment, services or resources. While a few services such as Dental, Diabetes and Ophthalmology need more specialised equipment and to have their own spaces, we adopted the philosophy that general clinical spaces could all co-exist. This has allowed us to group departments together. Another significant milestone for us is the opportunity this facility gives us to go ‘paper-lite’. We live in an increasingly digital world, and it makes sense to adopt technology that streamlines our patient records and makes them easy to navigate across services, and also reduces the need for volumes of paper. We’re excited about the future of being able to deliver world-class patient care in our new Outpatient facility.
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