Interior Health is moving forward with its mandate from the Ministry of Health to focus more than ever on prevention and health promotion.
During a presentation last week to Town of Osoyoos council, Interior Health’s Lori Motluk, the acute health service administrator for the South Interior, and Betty Brown, manager of the Healthy Communities Initiative, detailed how the organization continues to focus on initiatives that encourage residents across the South Okanagan to lead active and healthy lifestyles to prevent visits to hospital.
Interior Health provides health services to 742,000 residents in 58 municipalities. A total of 1,500 physicians and 19,000 staff, along with 4,800 volunteers, provide services in seven regional hospital districts and four regional hospitals, 16 community hospitals and 24 health care centres. There are just fewer than 1,400 hospital beds and 6,600 residential care and assisted living beds in the Southern Interior.
Even though prevention and health promotion initiatives will remain a priority, everyone who works with Interior Health is excited about the pending construction of the Penticton Regional Hospital’s Patient Care Tower, said Motluk.
Construction on the $325-million facility is expected to begin in the spring of 2016.
With 26,700 square metres of space, the new patient tower will be approximately three times the size of the South Okanagan Events Centre, she said.
The Regional District of Okanagan-Similkameen (RDOS) will provide $120 million for the PRH expansion, another $20 million will br from the South Okanagan Similkameen Medical Foundation and the final $160 million from the provincial government.
Completion of Phase 1 is expected in the spring of 2019.
With construction already underway on the Okanagan Correctional Centre just north of Oliver, Interior Health has already engaged in discussions to create a health care partnership with management at the new jail to ensure staff and inmates will receive quality health care services once the facility is operational, said Motluk.
Because the South Okanagan attracts many seniors to live here, the rates of chronic illness and disease are extremely high across this region, which presents many challenges to Interior Health programs, she said.
“We see an awful lot of people who are over 80 years of age,” she said.
Relatively new programs like Breathe Well and Surveillance Nurses, where experienced nurses talk directly with patients over the phone, have proven successful and will continue to expand, she said.
Penticton Regional Hospital has been successful in recruiting 23 medical specialists over the past 18 months and these specialists are helping provide quality service to patients across the South Okanagan, she said.
A goal for 2015 is to get as many of these specialists out to the smaller communities spread across the South Okanagan as possible, said Motluk.
“We are now seeing more specialists, when possible, getting out to meet patients instead of patients having to travel to see them,” she said.
Brown said Interior Health’s Healthy Communities Initiative is designed to work at the population health level to create healthy community environments and policies to improve health and wellness.
This includes programs that encourage increased physical activity, healthy eating, tobacco reduction initiatives, focusing on priority populations and creating healthy environments for residents.
Four staff work directly with the 58 member communities on the Healthy Communities Initiative, she said. Town of Osoyoos council signed an agreement with Interior Health in early 2013 to forge a partnership over the next five years aimed at reducing chronic disease and obesity through an expanded regional health care coalition, said Brown.
KEITH LACEY
Osoyoos Times
