Melissa Carr, Communications Coordinator – Vancouver Fraser Medical Program.
Royal Columbian Hospital (RCH), the oldest operating hospital in British Columbia, opened in 1862 with 30 beds for men only. Today, Royal Columbian serves one in three British Columbians and receives more patients by air ambulance than any other hospital in the province.
On October 7 2012, RCH celebrated 150 years of excellence!
RCH is a Fraser Health provincial centre and regional referral hospital providing specialized care for trauma, cardiac services, neurosciences and neonatal intensive care for 1.6 million seriously ill and injured people from across the province. RCH is also a UBC teaching hospital and Clinical Academic Campus with a well-established culture of medical education. It has been a teaching hospital for decades and a designated Clinical Academic Campus since 2004. RCH already offers Year 2 clinical skills experiences, eight core clerkships, numerous Year 4 electives, a PGY1 program, a Family Practice Residency program as well as a variety of experiences for senior residents.
By working in teaching hospitals, like RCH, students receive valuable medical training, and greater familiarity with the patients and communities they will one day serve. Dr. Dale Stogryn, a Clinical Professor in the Department of Family Practice and the education lead at RCH, states “the rich experience that students and residents obtain at RCH has been invaluable when it comes to the recruitment of many of our highly regarded medical staff and teaching faculty.”
The official affiliation between RCH and UBC began in 1988, when it was mandated by federal regulatory authorities and accrediting agencies that all medical internships be affiliated with a faculty of medicine. Prior to this this, hospitals provided rotating internships. RCH took on its first intern in 1951. Until the Provincial medical licensing requirements changed to a mandatory minimum of 2 years of postgraduate training in 1994, RCH provided a traditional 1-year rotating internship. This year, the hospital saw its 1000th intern rotate through the hospital.
Beginning in January, 2012, the Faculty of Medicine will be running an Academic Learning Community (ACL) pilot at Royal Columbian Hospital. The purpose of the ALC prototypical semester is to test and validate some of the concepts, roles and organizing structures that the MD Undergraduate Program plans to implement as part of curriculum renewal. Primarily, the focus will be on how UBC can optimize student continuity with preceptors, patients, curriculum and the learning environment, as well as aspects of professional identify formation, and the benefits of early, ongoing mentorship.
The UBC Faculty of Medicine is undertaking the Wireless Access to Educational Resources (WATER) project to address varying degrees of wireless access in clinical education sites. Royal Columbian Hospital will be one of the pilot sites for this initiative, which will define and document the means by which Health Authority (HA) wireless infrastructure in clinical sites can meet both Faculty of Medicine and HA needs.
Facts about Royal Columbian Hospital:
- 68,000 Emergency Department visits a year
- 10,000 trauma patients treated each year. RCH is one of only two major trauma centres in the province and receives more trauma patients by B.C. Air Ambulance than any other hospital in B.C.
- 30,000 admissions; 8,300 operations; 800 open heart surgeries; 800 neurosurgeries
- 400 beds
- 3,000 infant deliveries and 800 babies admitted to Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU)
- One of the busiest interventional cardiology programs in Canada performing 4,800 heart catheterizations per year
- 22,400 CT Scans and 5,600 MRIs
- Undergrad electives offered include: emergency medicine, anesthesia, subspecialty medicine, pediatrics, cardiology, trauma, ICU, interprofessional student clinic, among others
- Number of residents completing PG training at RCH each year: 29 – 30 PGY-1 residents spend a full year at RCH each year. In addition, roughly 800 – 1000 R1 – R6 residents from many different UBC residency programs rotate through a variety of clinical services at RCH.
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