MANITOULIN—The Douglas A. Smith Family Foundation has just made a $75,000 donation to the Manitoulin Health Centre (MHC)’s telemetry campaign.
Doug Smith visited MHC’s Little Current site on Wednesday, December 19 to view some of the equipment that his foundation’s money will go to support. This is the second donation the foundation has made towards the telemetry campaign. The first campaign donation was in February 2017 for $25,000, alongside a matching $25,000 donation from Manitoulin Group of Companies.
Telemetry equipment is used to monitor cardiac patients. The new advanced systems can be worn on a patient and report the results remotely to a nurse’s monitoring station, offering patients freedom of movement and increasing nursing efficiencies.
Mr. Smith toured the emergency department (ED) at the Little Current site with MHC President and CEO Lynn Foster, Registered Nurse and Clinical Nurse Educator Karl Cheung and ED Nurse Manager Julia Fedec. When the group arrived next to the telemetry equipment, Mr. Cheung offered an explanation of how the system worked before climbing into the patient bed and hooking himself up to the machine. The machine confirmed the suspicions of the group—Mr. Cheung was indeed alive, although his heart rate was a tad higher than normal, presumably because of the excitement of the occasion.
The Douglas A. Smith Family Foundation is a registered foundation formed to provide funding for other organizations registered under the Income Tax Act. The charity’s main purpose is to benefit communities on Manitoulin Island and in Northern Ontario in areas such as healthcare, education and municipal funding.
