New operating rooms to leapfrog Kelowna General into 21st century

KELOWNA — Okanagan surgeons will step out of cramped operating rooms next fall to new, large ORs boasting cuttingedge technology.

The four- storey Interior Heart and Surgical Centre, nearing completion, will equip the Kelowna General Hospital with 14 new and much larger operating rooms. The centre will be primarily devoted to patients needing heart, spinal, or brain surgery, and other complex procedures.

Until 2012, hundreds of patients from the Okanagan had to travel to the Lower Mainland or Victoria — many by air ambulance — for bypass surgery and other heart procedures. Since the hospital’s program’s first open- heart operation in December that year, medical staff have performed more than 1,000 surgeries.

But they have primarily done so in two older, cramped operating rooms, each crammed with the modern equipments such surgeries require. At 65 square metres, each new operating room is large and built so the monitoring equipment, suctions, microscopes and imaging hardware can be hung from the ceiling.

One of the new ORs, called a “hybrid room,” boasts a large robot that can take advanced images of a patient’s insides while surgery is underway.

“That machinery will come and zip around the patient and within about eight seconds, we can have a 3- D reconstruction of the heart,” said Dr. Guy Fradet, medical director of the cardiac science program, during a tour of the new facility this week.

“We can do the surgical part as we get ready for the imaging and do everything in one go. It allows us to treat complex patients. It will be one of the best rooms in the country when it opens.”

The KGH Foundation has raised $ 10 million toward equipping the Centre through its Be a Lifesaver campaign, but needs $ 2 million more.