A hospital cardiologist and a heart attack survivor made the plea to donors for six new telemetry packs for Ridge Meadows Hospital at the 37th annual Moonlit Harvest Gala.
The gala, which took place Saturday, Oct. 18, raised more than $275,000, for much needed equipment for the local hospital.
In addition to the telemetry packs for the Internal Medicine’s Telemetry unit, money will also go towards purchasing: a central monitor in the ICU, an additional monitor for Internal Medicine, a portable cardiac monitor for the Emergency department, two Massimo monitors for the ICU, and four vital signs monitors for the Urgent Primary Care Centre.
All of the new equipment will improve care at Ridge Meadows Hospital, said cardiologist Dr. Winston Tsui, because many patients have underlying heart problems.
In a From the Heart video posted online, Stefan Allner, a clinical nurse educator in the Emergency department, explained that telemetry monitoring is real time monitoring, a reflection of what is exactly going on with a patient’s heart rate at any given time.
Clinical operations manager in Emergency, Ruth Farnan, noted that traditional monitoring had patients attached to a bedside monitor and they had to wait for nurses to detach them from the monitors.
“With the telemetry packs and the portable monitoring, these patients will be able to get up, go to the washroom, go to tests, a number of things while they will be consistently monitored,” said Farnan.
“There is a central monitor that is viewable to the nurses and any change of those rhythms means that we can then go and assess our patient as a nurse,” added Allner.
Around 275 people attended the event at Meadow Gardens Gold Club.
There was a cocktail reception, gourmet dinner, live and silent auctions, raffle draws, the From The Heart fundraiser, and live entertainment.
Since our inaugural gala event in 1989, almost $5 million has been raised for the hospital.