More Bums Than Ever Before

Over eight thousand bums to be specific.

It’s reporting season, and some of the key numbers that we must provide to our stakeholders captures the amount of education/training/support opportunities that we create here at the Royal.

Recording bums in seats doesn’t tell us how effective we are in influencing change in professional practices and personal attitudes. We have other evaluation methods for that. But it’s a number that we should be proud of because this impressive number represents the work of a small and dedicated group of people. How small – a party of eight.

Our Director of Library Services led the creation of our Centennial Series of Public Lectures that brought nearly two thousand people into our Health Care Centre to learn how to cope with the burdens of Mental Illness.

Our Conference and Training Program Administration Assistant’s efforts resulted in thousands of healthcare professionals across the region and country acquiring the latest in knowledge and specialized skills training toward improving care for people with Mental Illness.

Over 200 of these events were broadcast across Ontario through the Ontario Telemedicine Network.

And from all this work, we generated revenue that we can re-invest toward building new programs that can provide even greater impact on those providing care and requiring care.

We continue to prove that clinicians and clients don’t always have to be in the same room. Our telemedicine consults increased by over 50%. That’s why we believe our gift from Bell to enhance our program is really a gift to patients living in rural and under-serviced communities.

And so it’s a proud moment for our team – but soon we must change our perspective and accept that these accomplishments will be yesterday’s news. And our new challenge will be to creatively plan how we will surpass these numbers next April. It may be scary, but it makes our work much more fulfilling.

As per our blog policy - the opinions and comments in this article represent those of the author and should not be considered representative of the ROHCG.