First pelvic health suite in Atlantic Canada officially opens to patients

Crystal Garrett gets details on the officially open women's pelvic health suite at Dartmouth General Hospital.

The first pelvic health suite in Atlantic Canada opened its doors at the Dartmouth General Hospital in Dartmouth, N.S., Tuesday.

The facility is said to improve access to pelvic health care and procedures as well as reduce wait times for patients.

It’s named the Deanne Reeve Pelvic Health Suite in honour of a Nova Scotia woman who died from cervical cancer in 2020. Her friends run the Orchid Gala committee and raised $500,000 in six months for the suite.

Stephen Harding, the president and CEO of the Dartmouth General Hospital Foundation, says the opening marked a “great day for women’s health in Nova Scotia.”

“This is going to provide incredible support for women’s health in an outpatient setting and also urology as well, so these are procedures moving from the operating room into an outpatient setting,” he says.

“The J & W Murphy Foundation, our lead donor to the Lead On campaign, started the ball rolling and then the Orchid Gala team really came on to make this happen.”

The province of Nova Scotia is also funding all operating costs.

Rachel Nalepa, the health services director and site lead for the hospital, says the team running the suite include a manager, surgical co-leads and a multi-disciplinary team.

She says while they are performing numerous operations and procedures at the suite, the ones with the biggest impact include hysteroscopies and cystoscopies.

“Hysteroscopies are essentially where the physician can insert a camera into the uterus of the patient and this is really going to help different diagnoses, specifically of cancer,” she says.

“The other thing that’s really important about this procedure taking place in the Deanne Reeve Pelvic Health Suite is that it will be taken out of our operating room, so it’s going to create a much more relaxed environment for our patients.”

Nalepa says it’s also going to free up operating room time so the hospital will be able to decrease their surgical waitlist.

“It’s helping everybody and we’re able to increase our hysteroscopies volume by four times, so up to about 1,000 per year,” she says.

While the suite officially had its ribbon cutting on Tuesday night, it has been operating for a little over a week.

Harding says patient response so far as been “incredible” and other suites could even be possible in other hospitals in the future.

“We’d like to test and learn at Dartmouth General, it’s like a living lab,” he says.

“We will test and try here as a little bit of a pilot,” Nalepa adds. “And then, we know it’s going to be successful, and once we prove that then of course there’s always hopes that we can spread across the province.”

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