Getting ready for tomorrow means preparing plans today.
The Sundre Hospital Futures Committee certainly seems to take that adage seriously.
The community is nothing short of extremely fortunate to have such a committed core of residents and medical professionals who are willing to dedicate their time, expertise and effort to help ensure Sundre continues to be able to deliver quality health care in a rural setting decades from now.
During the inaugural Sundre Hospital Futures Day last week, the organization officially announced its first major capital campaign with the goal of raising $100,000 throughout the course of the coming year for new state-of-the-art Spacelabs technology.
No — not a portion of the International Space Station, although that would be pretty cool too.
Rather, the committee aims to improve cardiac care services at the hospital by introducing four monitoring systems that will enable the facility’s staff to remotely keep an eye on patients without physically having to be in the emergency room.
Further to that, cardiac specialists in major centres would also have the ability to remotely monitor someone in Sundre, bypassing the need to diagnose a problem through more time-consuming discussions over the phone before deciding on the best course of action to treat the patient.
“So a specialist in Red Deer or Calgary or Edmonton can be getting real-time information from that monitor, allowing a cardiologist to see exactly what’s happening and subsequently make real-time decisions without having to go through several conversations to get there,” said committee chair Gerald Ingeveld.
He said the committee determined the need for the upgrade following an analysis of Alberta Health Services statistics and data that identified a higher rate of cardiac-related issues in our area .
“We’re 30 per cent more likely to be dealing with a cardiac event than the provincial average.”
That trend does not seem poised to stabilize or abate any time in the near future, so failing to take action today could very likely mean less-than-ideal outcomes for patients and their families tomorrow.
Personally, I hope to stay in Sundre for the foreseeable future.
While I also hope never to need a service such as the kind provided by the Spacelabs technology, the simple fact is I’m not getting any younger.
So there’s something reassuringly comforting about the knowledge that there are members of the community investing so much today to get ready for tomorrow.
Their worthwhile effort is nothing less than praiseworthy, and there’s little doubt in my mind that it’s just a matter of time before I find myself covering the unveiling of the new cardiac care monitors.
