Maya Angelou once said that people will forget what you said or did, but they’ll never forget how you made them feel.

For Yeonjoo Kwon and countless others around the world, this quote reflects everyday life as a nurse.

Clinical & Systems Transformation (CST) is a joint undertaking between VCH, PHSA and PHC to complete a significant transformation of clinical practices and systems. The project spans several areas of the continuum of care, including: acute care, inpatient and outpatient units, ambulatory care and residential care across VCH, PHSA and PHC.

Victoria Morris moved to Vancouver on a whim and hasn’t looked back. Originally from Ontario, the registered nurse soon found a job with Providence Health Care. 

Five years later, she accepted the role of clinical nurse educator for the Medicine and Ambulatory clinics at Mount Saint Joseph Hospital. 

Dr. Eric Grafstein says data drives everything he does in health care.

“We need the information at our fingertips,” says Dr. Grafstein, CST Chief Medical Information Officer, VCH/PHC. “We have a tremendous reliance on information from both inpatient units and the community in order to know what’s going on with the patient.”

From a hush that’s conducive to recovery to a sense of urgency when patients need it most, Eric Starr says the Intensive Care Unit at St. Paul’s Hospital is never the same from day to day.  

Eric, a registered nurse, has worked at St. Paul’s for over nine years. He chose St. Paul’s for its staff, patients and culture of caring.    

Since April 2014, he has been working on the CST project.

Paper is a fact of life.

Even once everyone is using the new integrated clinical information system, currently being developed as part of the Clinical & Systems Transformation project, we will be "paper light", not paperless. Some clinical documentation (such as Code Blue documents) will still be on paper; and paper documents will continue to arrive from outside VCH, PHSA and PHC. That’s where document imaging, or scanning, comes in.

The Emergency Design Team at the Clinical & Systems Transformation project has been working to design an integrated, electronic tracking board to make patient care more efficient and effective.

According to Cynthia Startup, former Emergency Design Team Manager, “The board makes it clear who needs to do what for a patient. You can send alerts to it, so everyone in the department can see them without looking at the patient’s chart, which is good for patient and staff safety. There could be alerts for isolation status, allergies, violent patients and care plans.

CST’s Quality and Professional Practice Advisory Group has selected an initial 25 interdisciplinary plans of care (IPOCs), from more than 1,200 that exist today across VCH, PHSA and PHC, for inclusion in the new clinical information system.

Steven Tam takes privacy seriously. As General Counsel and Chief Privacy Officer for VCH, it’s his job to balance the information needs of health care professionals, and the privacy of patient data.

Clinical decision support tools support health care providers at the point of care by presenting relevant information at the appropriate time. They do not make decisions for you; they allow you to make fully-informed diagnoses and decisions, using your experience, expertise and observations.