The Annual Med Gala for the Boreal Healthcare Foundation fundraiser was a special night for Prince Albert Physician Dr. Edmond Royeppen.
Royeppen, who has practiced in Prince Albert since 2003, received the Award for Outstanding Achievement in Healthcare, an honour carried over from the Victoria Hospital Foundation’s Doctor’s Gala.
“I think the most important thing is that it’s very humbling,” Royeppen said. “As I said in my speech, any one of the people that I work with on a day-to-day basis could be up there receiving an award.
“Prince Albert is blessed with a crew of incredible health care workers across the board,” he added. “I think having worked here for 23 years, you find people in every sphere of the healthcare staff, whether it’s the people who are the supply chain people, the social workers, the cleaners, they all come to work every day wanting to do a good job.”
A general surgeon serving Prince Albert since 2003, Royeppen is recognized for hisclinical leadership and decades-long commitment to patient care, education, and surgical excellence both in Canada and internationally. Patients describe him as real, truthful, and fully invested in their care.
In his portion of the video presentation Dr. Randy Friesen noted how Royeppen helped patients make a smooth transition out of the operating room (OR) by helping design a new streamlined system.
Royeppen said they were concerned about overcapacity, something every hospital in Canada struggles with. To help address the issue at Victoria Hospital, the new plan called for targeted times and achieving certain endpoints in a person’s care.
“What that would do is create a bit of efficiency in how we move people through the system,” he explained. “(It’s about) trying to spend as little wasted time (as possible) so that we could have patients move through safely and as quickly as we could to then create more space.”
This included creating a paper database on the patient and when they came in staff knew what the patient’s needs were.
“It was called the Acute Care Access Plan,” Royeppen said. “We called it ACAP. We’re still ACAP people today. Once the ACAP plan was formulated, then we would have a reference point to make sure that the patient’s needs were being met, but met in an efficient way.”
He explained that the ACAP record eventually became mainly used as an efficiency tool for staff. He said that at the time it was created it was the first step in what would be a development of a tool to understand a patient who returns earlier than expected.
Royeppen said the hospital isn’t as streamlined as it could be. He said having a seamless communication tool would also help speed up the process.
He explained that laboratory results arrive directly in a physician’s electronic medical record on a patient. But some other information and plans are difficult to connect on.
“I think a lot more work needs to be done,” he said.
Royeppen said he came to Prince Albert after he decided he no longer wanted to work as an academic surgeon in Durban, South Africa.
“There were a few options in terms of how to continue my career,” he explained. “One of them was to work outside of South Africa, and Prince Albert chose me.”
He said the family applied in a few different places but Canada was attractive because of the universal healthcare system.
“In places where there are two-tier healthcare systems, people who can afford better health get better health. People who cannot afford to have private medical insurances, for example, often end up with long waits, not getting the same level of care, levels of care that their more affluent counterparts get,” Royeppen said.
“The thing that attracted me to Canada was the concept of universality and equity in healthcare. It didn’t matter who you were, what your social status was, or your economic status, there was a legislated way for universal health care. That is what really attracted me to Canada.”
Royeppen worked in medical administration as a Chief of Staff from 2007 to 2014 and then returned to being a frontline surgeon. He said that balance was one reason he returned to the frontlines.
“I think it’s really difficult for people to balance two jobs when you’re holding down a
very busy clinical practice,” Royeppen said. “Administrative practice was very, very difficult and I found that I had reached a stage where I needed to make a choice. I still loved patient care, so I went back to patient care.”
Royeppen said healthcare is a collaborative effort. He said that the concept of team-based care is always in the forefront of how he likes to practice.
“No one can say that they individually provide care. Our care is enabled by others providing care, and it’s often enabled by our patients because our patients help us to provide them care,” he said.
(L to R) Dr. Edmond Royeppen, Malcolm Jenkins and Cody Barnett. Royeppen was recognized with the Award for Outstanding Achievement in Healthcare at the Med Gala at the Prince Albert Exhibition Centre on Friday.
“Each person in the team brings a certain skill set and we use that skill set to be able to provide efficient, timely care to people and particularly safe care.
“It’s when we work as a group and we are aware of each other’s skill sets and we make safety a focus that we allow a patient to go through a journey in healthcare—a very difficult, sometimes very complex journey—safely so that they get to the other side.”
The event featured a supper by My Place Catering and entertainment by Kelly Taylor. Royeppen received the award from Cody Barnett, Executive Director of the Boreal Healthcare Foundation, and Malcolm Jenkins of the sponsoring Malcolm Jenkins Family Foundation. Royeppen said that the work of the Boreal Healthcare Foundation and Victoria Hospital expansion project is important.
“Raising $40 million for a city like Prince Albert is a challenge,” he said. “We are not by any stretch of the imagination in an affluent city. But, we have some wonderful people that support the Foundation. I think continuing to help the Foundation, speaking about how important it is to equip the hospital in a way that can meet the needs of our community, is an important project.”
Funds raised from Friday’s Gala will support critical equipment and priorities at Victoria Hospital and across the region, focusing on the Equip the Vic campaign, an urgent regional
priority to ensure the new hospital is fully equipped and ready to deliver care. On Friday, Boreal Healthcare Foundation raised $142,376 to support healthcare in Prince Albert, central, and Northern Saskatchewan.
michael.oleksyn@paherald.sk.ca
