Members of Council March 10th, 1976

Mayor J.M. Campbell

Re: March 10th, 1976 GVRD Meeting

i. We had about 4 or 5 delegations re the Children's Hospital.

The Pediatricians recommend that this be built as a complete separate unit

and not on present hospital grounds. This is for tertiary treatment and

will in no way, they say, affect the children's wards in the outlying
hospitals. It would mean closing down the ones in St. Paul's and St. Vincent's
but Surrey, Burnaby, etc., would still have children's wards. 40% of the
children come from Vancouver City, 30% from the rest of the G.V.R.D., and 30%
from the rest of the Province. It will be interesting to find out how this
situation is resolved.

We also had the Chairmen of the Hospital Board of the Lions Gate

bs Dr eR No el eas : “lp sea nthe ea aes

Wangouver Geheral Hospitals. I was very surprised to find out that the
clesure of the rooms seems to not be a very large item. For instance, Lions
Gate is closing 35 rooms for a month or two and 30 rooms for at least 10 months.
VGH, which now has 1,800 rooms, appears to be phasing this down to 1,200. We
were told that there is no shortage of hospital beds and the Chairman of the
Lions Gate Hospital Committee said that elective surgery is no problem and
there is very little backlog. In order for this elective surgery to be
handled they figure they should have about 800 people waiting at any one time.
Therefore, I am bewildered - 3 years ago there was great panic in the streets
about hospital rceoms and we are now being told that with the use of ambulatory
care the need for rooms is no longer great. Apparently, the biggest thing
that needs to be corrected is Government support for budgeting. They pay per
day per bed which creates a hardship on those hospitals who are becoming
efficient with the use of ambulatory care. One question I asked was if their

budget was covered would they still close down those rooms and they said 'yes'.