The Westlock hospital celebrated a milestone on Nov. 17 commemorating 10 years of its orthopedic surgery program.
To celebrate, the health centre had an appreciation evening featuring Dr. Jan Lategan, an orthopedic surgeon in Westlock.
“He wanted to thank everybody who has a part in the orthopedic program in Westlock,” said site manager Sherry Gough.
Launched in 2004, the orthopedic program was started as means to decentralize services in Alberta to create breathing room within its major urban centres.
“The idea was the wait times for orthopedics was so long they wanted to unload the system,” Lategan said.
For instance, the average wait list for those needing an orthopedic operation was 12 to 18 months. Therefore centres were created in Hinton, Bonnyville and Westlock to try to relieve that pressure. In the process they recruited Lategan from Cape Town, South Africa, to facilitate it.
“It just amazes me just how well we do in the small little Westlock Healthcare Centre in comparison to the province,” Gough said.
Since its start-up date, the program has had its fair share of success. Waiting lists have decreased to an average of four months, and 94 per cent of patients in the Westlock area leave the hospital before the fourth day — the lowest stay period in the province. Prior to the program starting up it wasn’t uncommon to spend a week in hospital following surgery.
To date, the orthopedic program has completed 6,500 operations, which includes 2,214 hip and knee replacements and 1,700 inpatient surgeries. In fact the program has been so successful that one of the hospitals in Calgary wanted to observe Westlock’s success.
Lategan credits this success to the triage program at the health centre so he could see who needs surgery and who doesn’t.
This is not to say that the program is limited to hip and knee replacements, as they do trauma and sports medicine as well.
With the success of this program, Lategan hopes to improve on the wait times, where Gough hopes the health centre can improve on their scorecards provincially.
“We can never be satisfied, there’s always more we can improve on; at the same time, we’re the leaders in the province,” Lategan said.
