Listening is key to making Fraser Health better

This year, the number of people Fraser Health serves grew by 100,000 to 1.8 million. B.C. as a whole has 4.75 million people. That means we care for 38 per cent of the province’s population. When you’re the largest health authority in B.C., serving 20 municipalities from Burnaby to Boston Bar and growing, it’s easy to get lost in the numbers. How do you ensure that 1.8 million voices are heard?

We spend a lot of time listening. We listen to understand, to correct, to improve and sometimes to adjust course. Listening means we need to be ready to change. And when you are caring for this many people, change can sometimes seem slow.

In August, this point was illustrated when two seniors in our care attracted widespread attention. This couple had different care needs and were living apart, awaiting an opening in a specific campus of care they had chosen. They were eager to be reunited, and they felt it was taking too long. We worked with the family, and were thrilled when an opening became available and the couple were together again. In the conversations around this case, we heard your passion on the issue. In the 19 months prior, we had reunited 92 couples. But we knew we could do better. In the months following we reunited another 10, bringing our total to 102. We listened, and we made changes.

Sometimes it just takes one patient to spark system change. Earlier this year, a patient at a Burnaby residential care home was facing an unwanted two-month stay at Burnaby Hospital to receive intravenous therapy. His care team arranged to have their staff trained so that he could receive the IV-therapy as an outpatient and remain in his residence. This case inspired us to expand IV-therapy to two residential care homes and we have plans to expand across our communities.

While these are isolated examples, the reality is that patient voices guide our decision-making at all levels of our organization.

While we spend a lot of time listening to our patients, we also listen to our employees. Fraser Health has 25,000 employees and more than 2,600 physicians, and we heard their concerns about the violence they sometimes experience at the hands of patients. We knew from our research that 229 of 672 reported incidents of violence against staff in 2014-15 had resulted in injury to our employees, so last year we launched a Stop Violence public education campaign. Six months later 82 per cent of employees surveyed told us our promotions were helping to raise awareness of the issue of health care violence. With employee input we made significant operational changes — increasing security, hiring violence prevention experts and emergency room Client Service Ambassadors, conducting more than 200 Workplace Safety Risk Assessments, making physical site changes, surveying employees about safety at their site, increasing staff training, and educating 100 violence prevention facilitators.

An important part of listening is creating connections that allow you to hear and act on changes that need to be made. We depended on such connections in July, when our region saw a significant spike in overdose events — 43 in just three days, a 170-per-cent increase over the average. Our harm reduction team worked with RCMP, City Police and local outreach services to deliver front line communications about contaminated drugs that appeared to be circulating. The team has also handed out more than 2,300 kits of naloxone — an opioid overdose-reversing drug. We’ve continued to communicate with our communities, listening to their calls for our participation in community forums and naloxone training sessions. And we are listening to their requests for increased addictions treatment as well, with plans to increase opioid substitution therapy in Surrey, Maple Ridge and Abbotsford.

Major change rarely happens in isolation. It is generally a result of a series of small changes. These changes come from you. While they are often borne out of difficult circumstances, these circumstances create opportunities for system improvements. These changes don’t always happen quickly. But when they do happen, it means that eventually a person can avoid a two month hospital stay and get the care they need in their residence, an elderly couple can live out their final days together, and a community can begin to address challenging issues like addictions.

Karen Matty is the chairwoman of Fraser Health’s board of directors.