Thank you to everyone who submitted a design! The contest is now closed. Charity Christmas Cards are available for purchase. Learn how to buy your cards this year.

Calling all young artists! We’re looking for artwork to adorn our 2020 Christmas Card collection.

Send us your bright, festive designs that represent the North Shore for a chance to have your artwork featured on this year’s Foundation Christmas Card. The winner will also receive a $100 gift card to Park Royal.⁠⁠

This contest is open to students in grades 4-12, and the entry deadline is October 12, 2020.

Entries must be:

• Bright, colourful, festive, and embody the North Shore
• Proportional to reproduction at card size 5″x7″
• Submitted in JPEG format via email to [email protected]

For more information, please call 604-984-5914 or email [email protected]

We’re celebrating ten years of North Shore Hospice and the programs and services that help people in our community living with life-limiting illnesses.

You can join us by supporting our new Digital Upgrade Campaign to ensure that palliative and hospice care on the North Shore continues to thrive. With your help, we will be able to enhance support for hospice patients and connect with more people out in the community.

Please donate today to ensure that we can continue to provide the care and services that allow patients at Hospice and out in the community to live their best life possible.

Family Communications

We want to make it as easy as possible for Hospice patients who may have mobility and/or sensory issues to stay in touch with family and friends near and far. With the right, easy-to-use technology in each of the 15 patient rooms, we can ensure that patients with mobility and/or sensory issues can continue to connect with the outside world.

Home Away From Home

By bringing new music and entertainment capabilities to the patient rooms and common areas at Hospice, we’ll be able to offer patients and their families more options for taking a moment to relax. These will include a sound system in the Great Room, new gaming systems in the family rooms, and a new Smart TV in each patient room.

Virtual Support

Due to the COVID-19 health crisis the Every Day Counts program became an online service almost overnight. The free program, which provides free practical, emotional, spiritual, and psychological support to patients and their families, continues to serve a community of palliative patients as the pandemic continues.

While the Every Day Counts Centre hopes to bring back face-to-face sessions in the future, right now, staff and volunteers need high-quality tools and equipment to enable them to build and improve the virtual program.

Even when physical distancing restrictions come to an end, the virtual program will become a permanent feature of the Every Day Counts program. People in the community who were not well enough to travel have been connecting with the service for the first time and program leaders would like to extend and enhance services for people who could not access services before.

Please donate today and help us harness the power of technology to support everyone in our community in need of palliative and end-of-life care.

Donate to the Digital Upgrade Campaign

Fara Lambing is a Public Health nurse with the Child & Youth Team on the North Shore. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, she wanted to find a way to be more useful. So when she heard about an opportunity to redeploy and join the Personalized Stabilization and Support (PSS) team, she jumped at the opening. It gave Fara the chance to work with the PSS team and visit the COVID-19 patients following their discharge from Lions Gate Hospital.

The PSS team supports people to safely transition from hospital back to home. They provide community/home support and reablement care to increase self-reliance and optimal functionality. This type of care at home aids recovery and aims to get clients back to their normal activity levels as soon as possible. After more than two months with the team, she’s back with Public Health, but with a story to tell and gratitude to offer for her experience. Fara’s put pen to paper in hopes of inspiring other staff within VCH to share their experiences being redeployed during the pandemic.

In-vivo altruism – a novel experience in the time of a novel pandemic

During my redeployment to the PSS team I found the perfect, ethical opportunity to practice “in-vivo altruism” and kindness with the COVID-19 patients I visited in their homes. With the pace of the COVID-19 pandemic, reconnecting to the core of human kindness and altruism was the most effective skill for me to help my clients. It also helped rebuild their sense of self and replenish their motivation to return to who they truly are, despite their new health challenges and physical weakness.

During our weekly huddles, I quickly realized the focus of all my coworkers was also deeply rooted in the concept of kindness and altruism. The internal collaboration of our multidisciplinary team and careful planning of the goals and care plans not only improved the physical health of our COVID-19 clients, but also their emotional resilience, refocusing their energy to the positive.

Our collective efforts to devote quality time and really listen to our clients and their family members during our visits, created an empowering framework in which patients and their families could feel they were deeply and meaningfully seen. This was possible, despite their perceived powerlessness during the pandemic.

I fondly remember our 93-year-old grandma who told me she was banging her plates and cups in bed at 7 p.m. There was our 56-year-old client who, despite his muscle weakness, did his best to be on his balcony and said, “Every day, I applaud facing LGH for all the medical team members from the bottom of my heart.” And a client’s little daughter who happily opened the door for the rehab assistant and screamed, “Daddy’s teacher is here!” She was not even afraid of the yellow gown, face shield, and gloves. This is the least I can offer to recognize the emotional legacy of this pandemic.

Throughout this experience, I learned that it is in the midst of the challenges and interactions with others that we develop an aptitude within us to practice an in-vivo altruism and thereby actualizing our humanity.

I am very grateful to my wonderful Public Health Child & Youth team managers and coworkers who supported me in this valuable redeployment experience. And the outstanding PSS team members who empowered me with their generous guidance and lifesaving skills, always remaining selfless and humble.

-Fara Lambing

This article was written by Jeremy Deutsch, a Communications Specialist for Vancouver Coastal Health.

Paul Myers the local philanthropist who donated $25 million to Lions Gate Hospital and inspired the $100 million campaign to build a state-of-the-art Medical & Surgical Centre at LGH was guest of honour at a gathering to mark the latest phase in the construction of the new development.

He was joined by Ryan Beedie, President of Beedie Development Group and Chair of the campaign which successfully raised $104 million in support of the new facility.

The new plant that will power the new facility, as well as the rest of the LGH campus, is already operational and once this final demolition work is completed, the site will be ready for construction proper to begin.

The COVID-19 health emergency has placed more stringent infection control protocols on all hospitals. With the design of clinically enhanced spaces combined with ability to isolate more patients, the new hospital will be built to handle future health emergencies.

The facility, which will serve as a hub for acute and remote services for the North Shore and Coastal region, will include eight state-of-the-art operating rooms, a therapeutic healing and elder-friendly environment, a virtual health care centre serving more than 180,000 people, as well as 108 single patient rooms.

Construction for the Medical & Surgical Centre is expected to be completed at the end of 2024.

Thanks to Craftsman Collision, close to $120,000 has been raised to build a new Critical Care Unit at Lions Gate Hospital.

A promise by long-time corporate partner Craftsman Collision to donate up to $50,000 to match funds donated to LGH turbo-boosted our campaign for a new Critical Care Unit.

As the success of the campaign grew, Craftsman Collision, which is locally owned and operated by Bill Hatswell and his children Rick, Greg and the Hatswell family, stepped up and increased their gift to $60,000. Close to $120,000 was raised in total.

We also teamed up with Shell to offer a grand prize of free fuel for a year, worth $3,500. Shell has also generously donated twenty-five $75 gift cards so we have a total of twenty-six prizes up for grabs. Our Shell ‘Win Free Fuel’ giveaway has closed, and winners will be announced soon.

With Craftsman Collision, Shell, and the generosity of people like you, we surpassed our goal to help ensure that the Critical Care Unit is equipped and ready to accept its first patients in 2022.

You’re invited to take part in our Thank You Artwork initiative for LGH Week. Support our Health Care Heroes through your creativity!

Create a piece of artwork that shows your appreciation and support of our Health Care Heroes with a donation and submit a photo of you with it by sending it to info@localhost. All those who participate and make a donation between July 6-17th will receive a surprise from one of Lions Gate Hospital’s doctors during LGH Week (July 25-31). Two photos are needed for the submission – one of the art itself and another featuring you with the art. When sending in your masterpiece, please include the artist’s name and the name of the donor supporting your artwork.

Your artwork could be featured in our hospital and on a video shared on our social media platforms!

Our North Shore Lend a Hand Fund, initiated by Chan Sisters Foundation, provides short-term support to older, low-income adults who struggle with chronic health conditions and are on their own. It’s a new initiative unique to North and West Vancouver.

Community health care workers have identified gaps in care and the additional services that can keep clients well in their homes to reduce their risk of homelessness, cut down on the number of repeat visits to the emergency department and limit the negative impacts that medical conditions have on their day-to-day lives.

With small grants available from the Lend a Hand Fund, our community care providers can encourage social interaction by paying for group meals and activities and also offer vital health education.

Our community care workers visit dozens of clients every day. They see the challenges and understand how and where the Fund can make the biggest impact.

When you make a donation to the Lend a Hand Fund, you help bridge the gap between what the government provides and what our vulnerable older adults need to overcome the many challenges that they face.

Donate to the Lend a Hand Fund

Last September medical teams from across Lions Gate Hospital and a team of paramedics came together to take part in an emergency stroke simulation. It was part of an exhaustive year-long effort that has had a dramatic impact on the care that stroke patients receive at LGH.

A volunteer played a 62-year-old woman suffering from left-sided weakness. Two million brain cells die every minute during a stroke and the aim of the life-like training session was to get the patient from admission, to diagnosis to treatment as quickly as possible.

The team aced the session and reduced the time from admission to medication from 60 to 17 minutes. Less than two hours later during a debriefing session a Code 77 (stroke alert) was called on the hospital PA system. It was time for the team to put their training to a very critical test. In a weird case of deja vu, the real, live patient was a 62-year-old woman presenting with weakness on the left side.

With the simulation session still fresh in their minds, the physicians, nurses and paramedics were able to maintain the 17-minute timeline from admission to clot-busting drug. Three days later the patient walked out of LGH hospital with no long-term side effects.

“It was such a powerful moment. I still get goose bumps thinking about it,” says Marieve Legrand, Stroke and TIA Coordinator (Transient Ischemia Attack) for Neurosciences at LGH.

There have been many more similar cases since the stroke collaborative was launched.

Lions Gate Hospital is an Advanced Stroke Centre which has the technology and expertise to provide one of the highest levels of stroke care in the province. Last year 275 people suffering from acute stroke symptoms were treated in Emergency and on the Neurology ward at LGH. And it’s not just patients from the North Shore, people who live in the Sea-to-Sky corridor and Sunshine Coast are brought directly to LGH if a recent stroke is suspected.

Between October 2018 and October 2019 LGH was involved in the province-wide Hyper Acute Stroke Collaborative in an effort to improve survival rates and shorten recovery for stroke patients. Marieve Legrand coordinated the effort at LGH which included medical professionals from Emergency, Medical Imaging, and Neurology.

Time of arrival at Emergency to CT Scan has been reduced by 20 mins and the turn-around time for patients that need to be transferred to a specialist procedure at Vancouver General Hospital has been reduced by 35 minutes.

Education, simulation sessions, and awareness raising were all part of an effort to ensure that all the relevant staff have access to the latest medical research, were given time to develop the most efficient clinical practices and had the opportunity to hone their clinical skills.

Thank you very much to BlueShore Financial for matching gifts totalling $10,000 to our COVID-19 Emergency Response Fund. The total was met on Tuesday June 2nd, 2020. Thank you for helping us double our impact – turning $10,000 into $20,000!

The Lions Gate Hospital Foundation has allocated a total of $955,000 from the COVID-19 Fund to the purchase of life-saving equipment including ventilators, respiratory aids, thermometers, and physiological monitors.

Learn more about our response to COVID-19, and get involved today.

A Message from BlueShore Financial

At BlueShore Financial, our North Shore roots run deep with nearly 80 years of serving the community. Now more than ever, we need to band together to protect the health and well-being of our community members. We are proud to evolve our 25 year partnership with Lions Gate Hospital to help the North Shore COVID-19 Emergency Response Fund through the Double Your Impact program.