By Sheldon Spackman

Festival of Trees raises $1.1 million for Red Deer Regional Hospital

Dec 11, 2018 | 9:20 AM

Officials with the Red Deer Regional Health Foundation (RDRHF) have announced this year’s Festival of Trees has raised $1.1 million.

Held at Westerner Park from November 21-25, this year’s 25th Annual Festival of Trees will see proceeds raised go towards supporting the purchase of the Pyxis automated medication dispensing systems for placement in emergency, ICU/CCU, NICU, operating room, recovery room, unit 22 (cardiology), and select outpatient areas.​

RDRHF officials say over 1,000 new medication orders are written by prescribers and processed every day at the Red Deer Regional Hospital, with 13,000 units of medication dispensed on the care areas every 24 hours.​

Currently all processes are said to be paper based and manual, with the Pyxis automated system having numerous electronic features for safety and efficiency to accurately dispense patient medications and reduce the likelihood of human error.

RDRHF Board Chair Bob Bilton says the support shown by the roughly 500 donors, 2,000 volunteers and the enitre community has once again been incredible.

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“Year after year they continue to give and I know personally that many of them dig deep to be able to maintain their level of commitment,” says Bilton. “The other side of it is, is to think how hard these volunteers work to pull this off year after year. I suspect we have some volunteers that have put in three or four years, yet alone days of continuous work if you put it all together.”

However, despite the Festival of Trees Celebration Breakfast wrapping things up at the Holiday Inn & Suites in Gasoline Alley on Tuesday morning, Bilton says work on the 2019 event begins right now.

“That’s how long this event takes to put on and that’s how much work it takes to make this happen,” he explains. “So ultimately, thousands of volunteer hours every year and the commitment of the same people year after year after year.”

In terms of impact, Festival of Trees has raised over $16.1 million over the past 25 years, with Bilton pointing out it helps the AHS Central Region have world class health care in many areas of the Red Deer Regional Hospital.

“I think we all know that the provincial budgets are very challenged right now and funding for AHS (Alberta Health Services) has always been challenging, especially for Central Region,” states Bilton. “Red Deer is one of the last hospitals to actually be getting the Pyxis system which is really kind of unfortunate as this technology exists in Edmonton and Calgary for quite some time. Without the Foundation and the Festival of Trees, the love of children, the Hospitals Lottery, the house that we raffle off, without that money, we would not have the same standard of health care in Central Region as they have in the other centres.”

Despite serving roughly 400,000 Albertans, Bilton says being considered a ‘rural’ region means AHS Central Zone doesn’t enjoy the same treatment as Calgary or Edmonton.

“I believe what happens is we do not have the believed voter base to put the pressure on government to make sure that Red Deer isn’t considered rural,” explains Bilton. “A hospital that services 400-450 thousand people should not be thought of as a small town country hospital, so we’re trying to break those perceptions. We’re now at a critical point in numbers where we can fully justify services like cardiac cath and other highly technical services.”

However, Bilton adds there’s still reluctancy from AHS to bring those services to Central Zone because of the challenge to fund the operational dollars needed.

“But we believe we need that service, we believe we deserve that service and we believe that we as a community should have exactly the same rights as the large centres,” exclaims Bilton. “We’re getting there, AHS is showing signs of wanting to help with the redevelopment of this hospital and I believe truly in the next five to ten years we will have a major redevelopment and be able to bring the same level of services that every other hospital has, we just need to keep pushing.”

“We as a community are doing everything we can to support our hospital,” adds Bilton. “We need AHS to be there with us. I believe they will be, I believe they can be and we’re really looking forward to the opportunity to work with AHS in the future to support any redevelopment that comes to Red Deer.”

The 2017 Festival of Trees in Red Deer raised $1.2 million.