Lynda Bliss, president of the Rotary Club of Osoyoos, makes the club’s annual contribution of $5,000 for the new Patient Care Tower at Penticton Regional Hospital. Receiving the funds was Carey Bornn, executive director of the South Okanagan Similkameen Medical Foundation, who spoke at Rotary about the project recently. The Osoyoos Rotarians are contributing $30,000 over six years for the project. (Richard McGuire photo)

The foundation raising money to purchase equipment in the new patient care tower at Penticton Regional Hospital (PRH) is still $6 million shy of its target of $20 million.

That’s the word from Carey Bornn, executive director of the South Okanagan Similkameen Medical Foundation (SOSMF) who updated members of the Rotary Club of Osoyoos recently on funding progress.

Bornn has been on the job for 10 months, replacing the effervescent Janice Perrino, who led the initial fundraising effort.

As the Rotarians handed Bornn a mock cheque for $5,000, signaling their continuing contribution of $5,000 a year for six years, Bornn thanked them for what they’ve contributed, but encouraged them to keep giving.

The patient care tower is being named the David E. Kampe Tower in honour of the philanthropist who has pledged a total of about $8 million over the past five years, Bornn said.

Kampe’s contributions most recently have supported the purchase of a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) machine and the establishment of a nuclear medicine program.

Construction of the tower is expected to be completed at the end of 2018, with the tower opening for use around April 2019, Bornn said.

The tower will provide a new ambulatory care facility for day procedures.

There will also be five new operating suites that will be operational, along with room for an additional one when its operational costs can be funded.

“They will be the best in all the province because they will use the most up-to-date equipment,” said Bornn.

The tower will also include 84 new single-patient rooms. At the same time, existing rooms at the hospital will see a cut in beds to make them less crowded – four-bed rooms will be reduced to two beds and two-bed rooms will be reduced to one bed.

Once the tower is completed, a second stage of the project will see the emergency department renovated.

Bornn said original publicity suggested a four-fold expansion of the emergency facilities, but it is more likely to be a doubling.

“The ideal size would be about twice as big,” he said. “They can manage more people faster that way. They’ve got room for four times as big, but they’ll probably go about double the size right now.”

The hospital, he said, includes 190 doctors with 80 specialists. There is also a University of British Columbia (UBC) residency program that started a year ago with four students, which added another four on July 1.

Although Bornn has an Interior Health email address, he was at pains to make clear that the foundation he directs is an entirely separate entity from Interior Health and has different aims.

Interior Health is the provincial health region that pays for buildings and provides operating funding.

“They often don’t buy the equipment that goes into the hospitals and they’re seldom visionary,” he said, explaining that when physicians are inspired by the potential of new equipment, they typically approach the medical foundation rather than the health authority.

“It wasn’t that way 50 years ago, but it’s the way it is today,” he said.

Traditionally, the SOSMF has raised $2 million a year for hospitals in this region, which also include the South Okanagan General Hospital (SOGH) in Oliver and other facilities in the Okanagan and Similkameen.

Bornn said many donors earmark their donations for a particular hospital, with many people in both Oliver and Osoyoos saying they want their donations to go to SOGH.

In the past 30 months, the area from Oliver south has raised about $300,000 for SOGH, he said, adding that a third of that was raised by Rotary clubs in Osoyoos and Oliver and by the hospital auxiliary.

A further $400,000 has been donated from this area in the past 30 months to PRH, he said, bringing the total raised by the Oliver-Osoyoos area to $700,000.

“We’ve got a number that live in this area and they are giving $1,000 and $5,000 every year and it all goes into the hospital there (Penticton),” he said.

Bornn said the SOSMF committed to raise $20 million for the PRH tower when the project started.

“We’ve made that commitment without knowing where the money would come from,” he said. “We’re at about $14 million now, so we’ve got two more years to raise $6 million. On an average year, we raise $2 million, so you can see that math does not add up. So, we’re still trying to find new donors.”

RICHARD McGUIRE

Osoyoos Times

Carey Bornn, executive director of the South Okanagan Similkameen Medical Foundation, spoke to Osoyoos Rotarians recently to update them on efforts to raise funds for equipment in the Patient Care Tower now under construction at Penticton Regional Hospital. (Richard McGuire photo)