Past successes and future challenges highlighted at CIUSSS Public Information Meeting
CIUSSS West-Central Montreal is charting new directions in health care and social services by balancing “the innovative use of digital technology with an individual’s need for compassion, dignity and respect,” says Dr. Lawrence Rosenberg, President and CEO of the healthcare network.
Speaking on November 7 at the CIUSSS’s fourth annual Public Information Meeting, Dr. Lawrence Rosenberg said improvements in care “will come in the future in the form of new technology, combined with the attention and compassion that people need and deserve.”
Dr. Rosenberg was a featured speaker at the meeting, which acquainted the public with highlights of the CIUSSS’s activities in 2018-2019, while enabling visitors to direct questions to top CIUSSS directors and managers.
In addition, the winners were announced in the third annual edition of “A Shot of Happiness”, a photography contest for CIUSSS staff.
Seeing the user as a person, rather than just a medical case, is what enabled the CIUSSS to be effective in so many initiatives during the past year, Dr. Rosenberg said.
For example:
- At the Lethbridge-Layton-Mackay Rehabilitation Centre, the waiting list for the Motor Impairment Program has been eliminated.
- The rate of screening for delirium in hospitalized patients over the age of 75 has risen sharply at the Jewish General Hospital. As a result, underlying medical conditions are promptly diagnosed, and there is less risk of functional or cognitive decline.
- The team in the Mental Health and Addiction Program has collaborated with Donald Berman Jewish Eldercare Centre to reserve eight beds for patients with a psychiatric diagnosis.
- The Technical Services Team has developed significant energy-saving measures that contribute to the well-being of users at several CIUSSS facilities, including Catherine Booth Hospital and Donald Berman Maimonides Geriatric Centre.
- Prescription medication is now reaching hospitalized patients at the JGH more quickly, thanks to a new digital ordering system.
“These successes—and many more like them—are taking place all the time,” Dr. Rosenberg noted. “They’re symbolic of the underlying reasons for the nearly perfect score that our CIUSSS earned from Accreditation Canada last December.
“Our obligation—not just in health care and social services, but in all fields—is to continually ask ourselves what is fastest, simplest, most comforting and most effective for the people whom we serve. We still have a great deal of work ahead of us, but it’s a challenge that we are eager to tackle.”
Also among the speakers at the Public Information Meeting was Alan Maislin, President of the Board of Directors, who said the 34 facilities that were brought together to form the CIUSSS in 2015 are now “truly an integrated system that is focused on the people we serve.
“We’re very proud of what our team has accomplished, and every single day, we are trying to be innovative and creative. By eliminating the silos, our team is focused on the total care of each person who enters the healthcare system.”
