Report of Chief of Staff

to the Wilson Memorial General Hospital AGM

 June 16, 2011

As this year in the cycle of the board comes to a close, I want to express my gratitude for the opportunity to serve as Chief of Staff since Dr. Wilson’s departure in January.  This has been a challenging year for the medical staff, but also one in which we have maintained our staffing, our services and a high quality of care for our community despite the challenges we have experienced.  The medical staff are to be commended for their good work and consistency through this time.

Medical Staff and recruiting:

This past year has been a year of transition and change for the medical staff.

In October of this year, Dr’s Scott and Mary Wilson left their practices here and in January Dr. Peter Cunniffe left the community as well.  Fortunately we had been joined earlier in this year by Dr. Megen Brunskill who has now been with us for almost a full year.

We have also been fortunate to have Dr. Scott Wilson returning to the community to provide anaesthesia services for colonoscopies and cataract surgery as well as to provide support for the exercise stess testing program.

We continue to host several locums in the community and we are grateful for their support.  We are particularly thankful to Dr. Quinn who has been coming from Terrace Bay fairly regularly to support the medical group and as a result has been able to follow several patients and provide a measure of consistent care.

We are hopeful regarding future recruitment and we continue to work hard to lobby government for continued funding.  In addition we have lobbied the postgrad program of NOSM to continue to send residents from which we have historically developed a recruitment pool.

We are thankful also to the hospital, the community and Barrick Gold for their support of the “recruiter position” which is filled by Brett Redden.  Through his effort we have been successful in recruiting several locums who have had great experiences here and we continue to be hopeful regarding our future permanent physician recruitment.

It is important for the board to note that despite having a significant decrease in the physician human resource, we have managed to sustain all of the clinical services that we have historically provided.  I am grateful to the medical staff for their hard work and dedication to this community.

Locums and learners:

After a period of time in 2009 where locum recruitment was quite difficult, we have been pleased to be able to recruit a number of locums through the past year and we are currently booked through to the end of October.  This is thanks in large part to Dr. Nancy Fitch, Brett Redden and members of the community who have helped to make the locum experience here a positive one.

We have continued to support NOSM undergraduate and postgraduate learners as well as learners from other programs and we have accepted several teaching rotations through the fall as well. We hope that these medical learners will be the pool of physicians from which the community will draw new health care providers in the years to come.

Clinical Services:

As mentioned above, all of our usual clinical services, including primary health care services at the clinic, hospital emergency room coverage, inpatient care, chronic care, obstetrics, chemotherapy, exercise stress testing, anaesthesia for cataract surgery and colonoscopy, ultrasound services, and local coroner services have continued to be provided throughout the past year. 

As a medical staff we continue to support the delivery of medical services closer to home, and we hope to continue to be innovative partners in this endeavour into the year to come.

CQI:

As has been highlighted at previous board meetings, the medical staff has been engaged in quality improvement initiatives and understands the role of the MAC in the review of “critical incidents”.  We have provided educational sessions for ourselves, and we continue to participate in telehealth educational initiatives offered through OTN and NOSM where these sessions are relevant to our community.  In addition, the physicians remain committed to their own professional development and have all attended a variety of CPD events that support their ongoing learning.

We have aligned ourselves with the hospital board in prioritizing patient safety and have made review of issues in patient safety a part of every MAC agenda.

We have continued to develop pre-printed orders to standardize delivery of care for several clinical situations and we believe this has helped us to provide better care.  We look forward to the implementation of “open order sets” in the fall of this year.

The physicians and WMGH nursing staff are also participating in the MoreOB obstetrics program and in this second year of the program, the focus on communication skills will help to improve care and communication throughout the hospital.

Summary:

The medical staff has been working very hard over this past year to maintain stability of service delivery for the hospital and the community.  It is my opinion that the board can be very proud of the physician team at WMGH and the good work that continues to be provided here in this facility.

The medical staff are also grateful for the work of the whole health care team – nursing, diagnostic imaging, rehab, lab staff, housekeeping, kitchen staff, maintenance and administration.  It takes a whole team to deliver good care to individual patients and the community as a whole and we are glad to part of the team here.

In the spirit of excellent health care delivery,

Sarah Newbery MD CCFP FCFP

Chief of Staff