Yolanda Brooks, Author at Lions Gate Hospital Foundation

We have been working closely with the Lions Gate Hospital Emergency Operations Centre to coordinate hundreds of donations of supplies and equipment.

Thanks to the exceptional generosity of our community, we have reached our target for donated supplies. However, the situation changes daily, so if you have supplies you wish to donate to LGH, please contact us at info@localhost with details of the item and quantity. We will be in touch if the need for your item arises.

Alternatively, the British Columbia government is accepting donations directly here.

Please note at this time we are unable to accept donations of handmade items and services.

For Gift in Kind tax information, please review this Information Sheet.

If you are a restaurant owner and would like to donate food for the staff at Lions Gate Hospital, please read our food donation guidelines.

Thank you so much for your support.

Donating N95 Masks to Lions Gate Hospital

Thanks to Elisa Wei who delivered several boxes of N95 masks collected by a group of friends to Lions Gate Hospital.

Dear Friends & Supporters,

COVID-19 is a unique challenge for us all. Many of you have reached out to LGH Foundation over the past few days in response to the news of the five LGH administrative staff who tested positive.

Thank-you for your heartfelt concern. Foundation staff are not among these people. The impacted individuals work in a separate office from the Foundation and are now at their respective homes in isolation. We wish them all the best at this difficult time.

We are following the advice of our health officials to play our part in slowing down the transmission of COVID-19. Our offices are now closed to visitors with the majority of Foundation staff working from home. Although we are working in different locations we remain available to answer your questions and we will continue to reply to your emails and voice messages in a timely manner. We ask for your patience as there may be delays in tax receipting and general correspondence.

We offer our sincere gratitude to frontline staff at LGH for their selflessness and dedication to keeping our community safe and well.

All scheduled meetings to be held at LGH are cancelled until further notice.

During these challenging circumstances, we are committed to working closely with Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH) to ensure that our medical teams and patients have the resources and the support they need to work through this crisis. For this reason, we have launched the North Shore COVID-19 Emergency Fund.

The COVID-19 Emergency Response Fund was launched with dozens of donations ranging from $40 to $250,000. Two significant donations of $50,000 each were made by Bruce and Diana Chan and an anonymous North Shore family. Their gifts were followed by a generous pledge of $250,000 from Paul Myers, a renowned North Shore philanthropist and long-time friend of Lions Gate Hospital. I would be grateful for any contribution you might consider. Should you wish to make a donation, please consider making your gift online to ensure its timely receipt.

Most importantly, we need to look out for one another and to keep our community safe. For information on how to protect you and your loved ones during the COVID-19 outbreak, please go to: www.bccdc.ca/health-info/diseases-conditions/covid-19. You can check our social media channels for general updates and information regarding Lions Gate Hospital.

Thank you for your support. Stay safe and please reach contact us if you have any questions at info@localhost.

Judy Savage President and CEO Lions Gate Hospital Foundation

Lions Gate Hospital Foundation and Amica Helping Hands Foundation have teamed up to help support local seniors in need. Amica Helping Hands Charity has committed $250,000 to the Amica Compassionate Fund which will enable frontline community care workers to cover the cost of essential items that will improve the quality of life for seniors who are receiving medical treatment and enable them to stay in their homes. Frontline staff in North and West Vancouver make more than 38,000 visits a year and many of the people they support are seniors living in poverty.

“It is an unfortunate fact that more seniors are facing homelessness and more are now receiving community based health services in the local shelter on the North Shore,” says Sandra Edelman, Manager of Public Health, Chronic Disease Services, Primary Care on the North Shore. “Those seniors who face the painful daily reality of having insufficient funds to support themselves present difficult challenges for health care providers. When basic needs are unmet, which are foundational for their recovery and health, the work of the providers is compromised.” Money from the fund can be used for a range of supports including food, cleaning services, prescriptions, pest control, and emergency transport to help out seniors just when they need it most. Rich Lawrie, a social worker on the North Shore who once had a client who sold her wedding ring to make ends meet, says the fund is already having a significant impact on the quality of life of his clients. “I have been using this fund for a couple of months and it is amazing. As a social worker it’s a dream come true,” he says. “I love this fund because it’s like spackle – it covers many of the cracks in the social safety net.” Amica Senior Lifestyles established the Amica Helping Hands Charity to support Canadian seniors in need by providing them with the goods, funds and services they need to thrive. Residents from Amica Lions Gate, Amica Edgemont Village, and Amica West Vancouver were involved in raising funds for the Compassionate Fund which will be available for at least the next five years.

Congratulations to the five recipients of the 13th Annual North Shore Health Care Awards held at Lions Gate Hospital on Wednesday, January 22. Healthcare staff from across the North Shore attended the ceremony to celebrate and support more than 40 staff members who had won the respect and admiration of their colleagues.

Introducing the 2019 Recipients

Click this photo to view more images from the event.

Natalie Wilhelm, Workplace Inspiration

Natalie Wilhelm, who received the award for Workplace Inspiration was nominated by eight different people. Natalie has been a nurse for more than 25 years and she has been a mentor and inspiration to colleagues throughout her career on the North Shore. She worked across many disciplines including urology, ENT and general surgery before moving into community nursing. Through a lot of hard work and determination, Natalie was able to get the West Vancouver Ambulatory Clinic up and running in 2005. She is an influential presence in the community, not just providing nursing care but meeting with families, sourcing appropriate services, providing help and advice with housing, supplying food and clothes for homeless clients and even finding care for pets. Not only has Natalie helped improve the life circumstances of her clients, she has been an amazing source of knowledge to other health care practitioners in the community.

Marieve Legrand, Clinical Practice

Stroke patients get better care at LGH thanks to the efforts of Marieve Legrand, the Stroke and TIA (Transient Ischemia Attack) Co-ordinator for Neurosciences at LGH. During 2019 she joined a province-wide effort to improve care protocols for stroke patients. Through improvements in screening, making access to treatment more efficient and participation in hands-on simulation training, medical teams working across several departments at LGH have been able to speed up the admissions, diagnostic and treatment process to improve outcomes for patients. Following the success of the program at LGH, Marieve lead the development of educational materials to support care at other facilities in the Coastal Community of care. Marieve’s extensive knowledge, passion and commitment to bring best practice in stroke treatment to LGH and her constant goal of raising the quality of care and improving the outcomes achieved by patients and their families, made her the ideal candidate to lead this project.

Michelle Connell, Outstanding Achievement

During her 17 years at LGH, Michelle has been nominated for a North Shore Health Care Award six times. Described as a “natural leader and creative genius” by her colleagues, she has used her legendary interpersonal skills to transform simulation as the training and education Simulation Educator for the Coastal Simulation Program. Not only did the number of simulation exercises more than double in a 10-month period, she also extended the rural outreach program and inspired eight new user groups to join the simulation program. Working with teams in Emergency, Marieve Legrand and neuro-physicians, she devised a set of simulation events that tested and improved the Code 77 algorithm. Thanks to the sim-based training, Emergency staff were subsequently able to reduce the critical medication administration time from 60 minutes to 17 minutes in real, live emergencies.

The Spirit of Philanthropy Award

The Spirit of Philanthropy Award which is presented by LGH Foundation to exceptional individuals who exemplify a giving spirit and who frequently go above and beyond in their support of the Foundation’s fundraising endeavours was presented to two of the Foundation’s most active supporters.

For close to 18 years, anesthesiologist, Dr. Shafik Thobani has been a champion of the Foundation. Over the past three years, his work behind-the-scenes has helped to raise millions of dollars for the Medical & Surgical campaign.

The second recipient, Egidio Pasin, Site Co-Ordinator, Diagnostic Imaging, has been an active volunteer at numerous Foundation events including emcee at the annual LGH staff BBQ. He has led out-of-hours donor events and most famously, he has taken on mascot duties for the Foundation and donned and danced in the Seymour the lion costume.

As well as receiving the admiration and respect of their colleagues, each of the 2019 recipients took home $1,000 and a keepsake trophy.

LGH Foundation would like to thank event emcee Braden Davie, Director Professional Practice, Nursing & Allied Health and all of the staff who participated in the celebration video that got the awards ceremony off to a rockin’ start!