North Shore residents will receive enhanced levels of care as Vancouver Coastal Health opens the doors to the new High Acuity Unit (HAU) at the Lions Gate Hospital.
The HAU is located next to the Intensive Care Unit, bringing all of the hospital’s inpatient critical care services together on one floor where patients can be cared for by specialized teams of staff and medical staff.
The new HAU has 12 individual patient rooms providing a new level of care between the one-on-one care of the ICU and a general acute ward. The unit includes vital-signs monitoring equipment and other technology to support high acuity care, built-in patient lifts for patient comfort and staff safety and care cubbies that accommodate mobile workstations that allow nurses to monitor patients at the same time.
“The new high acuity unit at Lions Gate Hospital will help critically ill patients get improved access to the care they need,” said Adrian Dix, Minister of Health. “I thank the Lions Gate Hospital Foundation and all those who donated to this project to make it happen.”
“What we are doing is following the principle of patient-centred care – we are putting the patients in the High Acuity Unit and wrapping the care they need around them,” said Corrie Irwin, Director of the ICU and Emergency Department at Lions Gate Hospital. “We are going to be seeing increasingly complex patients – they may not require the high level of care provided in the Intensive Care Unit, but they need supports beyond what’s available through inpatient programs. The High Acuity Unit fills that gap. It completes the continuum of care.”
The HAU will serve patients who need more complex care than available on the medical and surgical units, but do not need the level of life support care provided in the ICU. Patients treated in the new unit will be cared for in a comfortable family-friendly space as well as supported by a multi-disciplinary team and the most up-to-date innovations in patient care and technology.
Made possible by donations through the Lions Gate Hospital Foundation (LGHF), the $10.3 million fundraising campaign attracted substantial contributions from members of the community, including a $1.5 million donation from the Dennis and Phyllis Washington Foundation. In honour of the gift, the unit has been named the Seaspan High Acuity Unit.
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