By Dr. Christine Harrison
Have you ever wondered what exactly happens in that large building on Bruyère Street between Parent and Dalhousie?
From 1866 to 1980 the building housed Ottawa’s first General Hospital. Today it is a leader in the delivery of sub-acute care and operates as a multi-site academic-health-care organization that maximizes quality of life and helps people stay in their home or return home after hospitalization. The hospital delivers a wide variety of services in aging and rehabilitation, medically complex, palliative, residential and primary care.
Bruyère delivers several streams of inpatient care including palliative care, geriatric rehabilitation, stroke rehabilitation and complex continuing care, where patients are provided a variety of services in a hospital setting with the goal of helping them return to the community
Bruyère is the largest provider of inpatient palliative care in the region and is a leading innovator in care and research in this field. The bilingual palliative-care unit provides care to patients and families requiring in-hospital care. Beyond the walls of the hospital, the Regional Palliative Consultation Team is a partnership between Bruyère and the Champlain Local Health Integration Network which supports health-care professionals caring for palliative patients in the community.
Bruyère currently has 50 beds dedicated to geriatric rehabilitation and a 33-bed inpatient stroke rehabilitation unit. The success of the programs can be witnessed by increases in the percentage of discharge rates to the community for stroke and geriatric patients from year to year. The stroke rehab unit is constantly finding new ways to help people after a stroke and in 2018-19, 88% of stroke rehab patients were discharged to the community. Bruyère is also home to a two-site academic family-health team which employs almost 100 staff, including physicians, nurse practitioners, social workers, pharmacists and clerks. In 2018-2019, the units trained over 50 family-medicine residents in partnership with the University of Ottawa, and provided comprehensive health care to over 17,000 patients in the Ottawa region, with almost 48,000 patient visits in 2018–19.
The Bruyère Research Institute (BRI) is pushing boundaries to transform health and care for and with the community. One major innovation arising out of work by researchers at the BRI is the Champlain BASE™ eConsult, which allows family physicians the opportunity to seek and receive advice from a specialist regarding health challenges facing a patient in as little as two days by use of a secure online platform that connects primary-care providers to consultants. Not only does this platform reduce wait times dramatically, it also reduces the number of appointments a patient has. With eConsult, the primary-care physician takes the question directly to the specialist and relays the result to the patient, improving the patient experience. The innovation has been so successful it has now spread to several other provinces.
Inside the grey stone building on Bruyère Street are people who work diligently and with commitment to better the health and lives of not just the patients inside their walls but people everywhere in Canada.