On one hand, the president and CEO of Sudbury Regional Hospital is trying to develop the facility into an academic health research centre, where medical professionals are trained and innovative research is performed.
On the other hand, Dr. Denis Roy, who became the hospital’s leader roughly a year ago, is trying to protect the hospital’s acute care mission in the face of problems associated with high numbers of alternate level of care (ALC) patients.
Can he do both at the same time?
Roy says he can.
“An academic health sciences centre adds value to patient care,” he said during a recent interview with Northern Life.
“It doesn’t steal from patient care.”
ALC patients, or as Roy now prefers to call them, “post-acute care patients,” are those who no longer need acute care but continue to occupy hospital beds because they cannot find placement in community facilities, such as nursing homes.
He said he likes the term “post-acute care patients” better because people have told him the “ALC” patient designation has come to mean something “demeaning,” in that these patients feel they aren’t “wanted anywhere.”
An academic health sciences centre adds value to patient care. It doesn’t steal from patient care.
Dr. Denis Roy,
president and CEO, Sudbury Regional Hospital
There’s “no contradiction” between the need to mitigate the problems associated with post-acute care patients and moving towards creating an academic health sciences centre, he said.
“One can proceed with taking care of the post-acute care patients, at the same time that we’re taking care of the other pathway,” Roy said.
“I think one can help the other. The academic part can help the post-acute care (patients) in terms of finding new treatments, and helping the authorities to decide where they would be best taken care of.
“Also, if we think of things other than ALC, it’s less boring, as it were. I think we have to have a vision that is not stuck in the past. Before I came here, all I heard and all I read was (about) post-acute care patients. Nothing else.”
Since early last year, the hospital’s former Memorial site has been home to a transitional care unit for roughly 130 ALC patients.
The transitional care unit is scheduled to close at the end of March, and those who occupy these beds will be transferred to long-term care facilities or other community programs.
Meanwhile, Roy has plans to use the Memorial site as an outpatient facility for programs helping those with chronic conditions such as diabetes, lung and heart disease.
Some community members argue the facility should become home to the ALC patients who remain in the hospital’s acute care site.
This week, there are 67 ALC patients in the hospital’s acute care site, although Roy said he is hopeful their ranks will lessen with the upcoming opening of the St. Gabriel Villa long-term care facility and interim long-term care beds at Pioneer Manor.
“People may ask me, ‘Why are you closing those beds at the Memorial?’” Roy said. “Well, those beds are costing about $14 million a year. How am I going to pay for this? Close beds here (at the acute care hospital)?
“No. This hospital is an acute care institution. I don’t think I’d be doing the population a service if I closed beds to open up other types of beds.”
When asked what he has to say to those concerned about what will happen to the hospital after the transitional care unit at Memorial closes, Roy said his job is to protect the acute care mission of Sudbury Regional Hospital. “I’ll do everything I can to do that,” he said.
While all of this is going on, Roy is moving forward with his plans to turn the hospital into an academic health sciences centre.
With the number of students being taught at the hospital increasing, Roy is pushing for a “learner’s centre” to be built in the hospital’s centre tower.
Dr. Denis Roy said he plans to develop Sudbury Regional Hospital as an academic health sciences centre, while at the same time dealing with problems associated with high numbers of alternate level of care patients. Photo by Wendy Bird
The facility would consist of a learning space for students and staff, and include classrooms, an auditorium and a simulation lab.
Roy said the North East Local Health Integration Network has sent a letter to the province, asking for funding for the project. He said he hopes it will be opened in 2012.
Roy, a kidney specialist who said he wanted to become a medical researcher before discovering he had an allergy to lab animals, also wants a medical research centre to be built on the hospital’s campus, close to the cancer centre.
This centre is still in the planning stages, but Roy insisted it won’t remain in this stage for long.
The hospital recently announced it has hired Dr. Francisco Diaz-Mitoma, the former chair of the department of laboratory medicine and pathology at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario, as vice-president of research.
“We hired him to recruit (researchers) and then run the research institute,” Roy said.
The Sudbury area has a high incidence of many health conditions, such as multiple sclerosis, vascular problems, obesity, diabetes and cancer, and research needs to be done to find out why, he said.
As Roy leads Sudbury Regional Hospital in a new direction, he admitted there can be some disconnect between health workers at the ground level and administrators, such as himself.
When he was still practising medicine, he said he only thought about the patient in front of him. Now that he’s an administrator, he has to think about all of the patients, and sometimes is forced to “make choices based on priorities.”
“Also, the other major difference is when I take care of a patient, and the patient gets better overnight, that’s a very nice feeling,” he said.
“I don’t think we get things overnight in administration.”
Meeting with local doctors
Roy was to meet with physicians and surgeons who work at Sudbury Regional Hospital Jan. 19 to discuss issues surrounding ALC patients and the impending closure of the Memorial transitional care unit.
“It’s all about the effects of the ALC numbers on the medical staff — specifically the cutback in surgical volumes, because there’s too many medical patients in surgical beds, and what’s going to be happening in the future concerning the closure of the Memorial,” Dr. Peter Zalan, president of the hospital’s medical staff, and co-chair of the Sudbury ALC Steering Group, said.
Roy said he plans to tell the doctors “exactly the same thing” as he told Northern Life about issues surrounding ALC patients and the closure of the transitional care unit at Memorial — that his job is to protect the acute care delivery role of the hospital.
