NEWS RELEASE
GEORGIAN BAY GENERAL HOSPITAL
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Georgian Bay General Hospital (GBGH) in Midland is celebrating the completion of a major renovation to its sterilization department, which took place in two phases over the past four years amid pandemic-related delays.
The completion of this project marks a major milestone for the hospital which relies on safe, high-quality sterilization for a variety of instruments, equipment and devices used throughout the hospital.
“The redevelopment of our MDRD is an essential part of GBGH’s strategic objectives to grow our surgical program to align our services with community needs, bringing care closer to home,” says Matthew Lawson, president and CEO, GBGH. “Over the past six months, GBGH has been able to increase surgical volumes to 163 per cent of pre-pandemic levels. We’ve been successful in our strategy to grow our surgical volumes by investing in equipment, broadening the range services we provide and optimizing our OR spaces. Finalizing our new state-of-the-art MDRD project perfectly complements our hospital’s ongoing surgical expansion plans.”
The two-phase project began in 2018, after GBGH proactively initiated an assessment of its sterilization processes and physical space to identify areas to improve efficiency and update equipment. After receiving recommendations, the hospital had to outsource medical device reprocessing to an external supplier, enabling a renovation project of this size to begin.
Phase 1 of the project took place pre-pandemic and then was delayed. Phase 2 work has since occurred over the past eight months, resulting in the final completion this month. Due to its complexity and duration, this project required great patience and flexibility among MDRD staff and project team members.
Recognizing the vast improvements the redevelopment would have on the standard of device sterilization at GBGH, the team has embraced learning the latest equipment and the changes in workflow. With the completion of this project, GBGH will no longer be externally contracting sterilization, which consisted of transporting back and forth to the Greater Toronto Area the devices, instruments and equipment the hospital uses daily.
Bringing sterilization back in-house is a cost savings for the hospital and reduces the likelihood of logistical issues and errors with transport. Between April 2021 and March 2022, GBGH performed 4,012 surgical procedures despite the pandemic-related ramp down of non-urgent and elective procedures.
The hospital’s plans to continue growing its surgical program are in part due to more than 3,700 local patients travelling elsewhere for surgical procedures which can be performed at GBGH. This equates to more than 600,000 kilometres and 7,500 hours of travel that could have been saved by local patients.
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