An all-out effort will be made in 2008 to recruit at least three new children’s heart doctors to London, the head of the city’s hospitals said.
“It is very, very important to me to sustain Children’s Hospital and therefore we are going to devote a lot of time and energy to try and make this happen,” said Cliff Nordal, president of both London Health Sciences Centre and St. Joseph’s Health Care.
Both of London’s children’s heart doctors, Dr. Dion Pepelassis and Dr. Ilan Buffo, have resigned to accept positions at Winnipeg Children’s Hospital at the end of June.
"London needs a minimum of three of the specialists to provide a sustainable service and will try to hire four by the end of 2008, " Nordal said.
“We will be looking as well at international medical graduates that are in training in Canada.”
Nordal called the loss of the two children’s heart specialists “a blip” in an otherwise successful drive to recruit health care professionals to London.
Faced with the closure of hospital beds because of a lack of nurses, London Health Sciences Centre set a target last February to hire 450 new nurses.
To date, the hospital has recruited about 340, allowing it to reopen all of the closed beds.
“We expect by the end of March we will reach our target,” Nordal said.
The closed beds contributed to extended waits for patients in the city’s emergency departments and led to the cancellation of some surgeries.
"Not all the problems will be solved with the beds reopened," Nordal said.
The hospital still has difficulties providing enough beds for acute care because 40 to 70 beds are occupied by people waiting for placement in long-term care facilities or back into the community.
The Ontario government announced it will expand the number of long-term care beds in the London area by 600, but those beds won’t be available until late 2010.
St. Joseph’s Health Care has proposed to the Health Ministry that it opens 50 beds at the Parkwood Hospital site, at least on a temporary basis, to reduce the pressure.
“That has not been approved yet, but we are hopeful that that will be considered as at least an interim step,” Nordal said.
Another challenge that will persist in the face of rising cancer rates is the wait times for cancer scans and therapies.
In the past year, the number of people receiving cancer therapy treatments at LHSC grew by 15 percent.
“It is just a burgeoning amount of care required. It spills over into surgery, it spills over into imaging and as a result those are the areas we are having our greatest wait list challenges.”
“Those will be areas we will try to tackle in the coming year, trying to get down to the provincial average where possible,” Nordal said.
Source: The London Free Press
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