Dr. Bert Kelly had his wish list fulfilled Saturday night.
Like a lucky game show contestant, he struck it rich on the Pat and Shirley Show.
The grand prize Kelly and the Northern Medical Society will now get to plan is a $10 million staff learning centre to be constructed at University Hospital of Northern B.C.
Liberal MLAs Pat Bell and Shirley Bond took over the mics on the Civic Centre stage at the eighth annual Dr. Bob Ewert Memorial Lecture and Dinner and reeled off a skit to highlight Kelly's persistence over the years in continuing to ask the provincial government to pay medical improvements to benefit northern B.C.
Bond alluded to a figurative pebble Kelly put in her shoe a few years ago that has since grown to a fist-sized rock the government could no longer ignore. Hospital staff from all disciplines stand to benefit from the provincially funded facility, which will be base for medical teleconferencing, replacing a portable trailer that once served that purpose in the site now occupied by the under-construction cancer clinic.
"That $10 million will mean we'll at last have a facility where we can bring in speakers and not feel ashamed of the facility," said Kelly. "Over the last two [Bob Ewert Dinners], we put together a little slide show that showed what the government had in fact given [to the medical school in Kelowna], who have not yet had one medical school graduate to their name.
"We've now been in the medical school business here for eight years and we've been living out of an Atco trailer which leaked. When that was finally hauled to the dump, they put us up in a totally inadequate room on the fourth floor of the hospital. We raised this with the politicians three years ago and they listened."
The learning centre auditorium will not only serve doctors and nurses, but physiotherapists, occupational therapists, and pharmacists. It will feature a wireless network to allow video conferencing and moveable walls to allow rooms to be reconfigured to suit multipurpose.
"It's not going to be an amphitheatre, which are vacant most of the time," said Kelly, executive director of the Northern Medical Society. "This will have the latest in electronics and it will double as a library because of course there are no books in [hospital] libraries anymore.
The Ewert event was the annual fundraiser for the Northern Medical Society, which helps medical students with the cost of their education and helps support their rural medicine job placements.
In his speech to the crowd, Kelly spoke of all the accomplishments made over the past 10 years in the local medical community. Since the spring of 2002, the Northern Medical Program was set into motion at UNBC to produce homegrown doctors; nurse training capacity increased six-fold; a nurse practitioners program was set up at UNBC; lab technology training and X-ray imaging lab technology programs began at the College of New Caledonia; a full-service cancer treatment centre is now being built, on time and on budget; physiotherapy students will be able to finish off their second-year studies through clinical placements in northern B.C.; occupational therapy and speech language pathology programs are on the way; UHNBC officially became a teaching hospital tied to UNBC; and there have been significant improvements to primary patient care at UHNBC.
Kelly also identified an eighth pillar of the Northern Medical Society, Wellness in Northern B.C. (WIN BC) which will aim to improve the health of people in northern communities through fitness and sport.
Keynote speaker John Furlong, CEO of the Vancouver Olympic Committee (VANOC) and now an executive with the Vancouver Whitecaps soccer team, dazzled the crowd of about 800 with a moving speech that focused on the triumphs and tragedies of the 2010 Winter Olympics and his experiences hosting a national event that raised the spirits of Canadians to unprecedented heights.
Former Prince George family physician Dr. Galt Wilson was inducted into the Northern Medical Hall of Fame, and third-year UNBC medical student Dan Le received the inaugural Rising Star Heath Service Award.
