Rural Surgical and Obstetrical Network (RSON)

The Rural Surgical and Obstetrics Networks (RSON) stabilizes, supports and enhances the delivery of quality healthcare to vulnerable rural populations in British Columbia, including Indigenous populations.

Achievements

New Interactive Tools

RSON teams have come together to produce locally-developed virtual tours / patient orientation videos for pediatric dental procedures, labour and delivery rooms, and general OR orientation. These interdisciplinary projects brought whole teams together to focus on improving patient experience, and have served as opportunities for sharing across the network as different sites have collaborated on scripts and processes.

A New Welcome in Vanderhoof

Vanderhoof’s RSON team came together to produce a community-focused Maternity Experience Survey, combining questions the hospital team wanted answered with input from local patients and Carrier Sekani Family Services to understand patient preferences and community needs. The survey identified opportunities to improve access to maternity services locally, including some quick wins like revising discharge processes and improved sleeping options for partners. This work also lead to a delivery room redesign, incorporating the needs of the team with feedback from the community, in a wonderfully reimagined and more welcoming space.

Working in Partnership

In partnership with hospital and community working group tables, the Smithers RSON team focused its efforts on supporting their maternity nurses and building a more sustainable staffing model across the hospital. This included working groups with nurses, physicians, and administrators, utilizing locally collected quality improvement data, and co-creating a proposal for new staffing rotations and additional lines where appropriate. While this work spanned across many different tables over multiple years, the energy and commitment of the local RSON team served as a catalyst to kept the momentum up and push this project across the finish line. These changes and additional lines are expected to go into effect Spring 2024.

Explore the numbers

4 Papers Published

During 2023 the RSON team had 4 new papers published. There are currently 13 additional papers in development.

154 Maternity Survey Respondents

In 2023, 76 maternity patient experience survey responses and 78 maternity nurse skills confidence survey responses were collected.

33 Perioperative Survey Respondents

33 perioperative nurse skills confidence survey responses were collected.

6 Presentations

The RSON team had 6 community presentations or posters accepted and presented at the 2023 Quality Forum.

Making a Difference

The Creston RSON team has presented their locally-developed algorithms for maternity service interruptions and numerous communities across the province have used these algorithms as templates for their own proactive planning for potential service interruptions.

“Our team in Smithers is grateful for the work that Creston has done to develop creative, innovative, and thorough algorithms. They have shared their work with us, which has allowed us to modify it to our site. Integrating this tool into our Emergency Room, including a prompt to MaBAL, has given the staff comfort and confidence in knowing there is a process and knowledge at hand in the event of a birth in our ER. ”

Smithers RSON Team

View recently published RSON papers on the RCCbc Research page.

Partnership Work

In collaboration with Perinatal Services BC (PSBC) and RTVS, RSON has continued to support virtual neonatal simulations and learning opportunities with RSON teams. Online ‘refresher modules’ for both NRP and ACoRN were developed with PSBC to compliment the full courses of both those programs. These modules were accessed by rural teams in advance of virtual simulations facilitated by CHARLiE pediatricians and PSBC neonatologists.

Plans for the Future

Another five community-led project presentations are coming to Quality Forum in 2024, as well as a joint poster presentation with Interior Health to showcase the collaboration in developing physician-accessible interactive endoscopy quality reports.

The RSON team will also be presenting at SRPC’s Rural & Remote conference, sharing the impact of locally-driven quality improvement programs on the stability of core hospital services.

Local teams continue developing their team-led quality improvement initiatives, with the opportunity to share learnings and best practices at provincial Quality Dialogue sessions. Teams also continue to use the existing skills confidence assessment tools to develop site-specific learning and coaching plans, with an added goal of extending these nurse-focused assessment tools into a set of provider-focused needs assessments to identify both individual and team opportunities.

Sites continue to collaborate within their regional networks to increase access to safe and appropriate procedural and maternity care closer to home.