Taking stock one year after long-awaited opening

Tuesday is the one-year anniversary of the Royal Victoria Hospital’s move to the Glen site — which now includes the Montreal Children’s Hospital, the Montreal Chest Institute and the Shriners Hospital for Children. Depending on whom you ask, the last 12 months have been a resounding success or a sign that health care in Quebec has fallen on hard times.
Over the course of the next few months, insiders would tell the Montreal Gazette that those glitches spiked to about 14,000. Perhaps the most well-publicized were incidents of raw sewage backing up into the Children’s Hospital last August.
Manny Kolyvas, who sits on the committee, says that when the hospital opened its doors, only two public bathrooms in the 2.4 million square-foot site were truly handicap accessible.
“These days, if you build a shopping mall you have to make sure it’s truly accessible to people with limited mobility. And yet this is a superhospital at the cutting edge without much cutting-edge accommodation to people in wheelchairs.”

A code purple is when hospital staff is brought in to evaluate patients in the ER and send some of the less urgent cases home.
“It’s normal to have code purples every day during flu season,” said Joseph. “But one or two a day every day, that’s not normal.”

Many of the services once offered at clinics in the Royal Victoria and Children’s hospitals have now been transferred to semi-private institutions, where additional costs — such as allergy tests and more comprehensive blood work — are often shouldered by patients.
Read the full story at the Montreal Gazette