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Building for the Future

With your help, we raised more than $3.6 million!

by Kris Wallace

Published

St. Paul’s Foundation set an ambitious goal to raise $3.6 million as part of our 25th annual Lights of Hope. We are proud to say we not only met our goal, we surpassed it!

Raising that much money is very much a community effort. We’re beyond grateful for the generous support of our corporate partners, individual donors, and of course, PHC staff.

Since 1998, your donations during Lights of Hope have raised more than $50 million to fund urgently-needed equipment, life-saving research, teaching programs, and countless patient and resident initiatives.

And your gifts support St. Paul’s Foundation itself so we can support you. To cite just one example, because of your donations to Lights of Hope, Dr. Ioana Lupu has a handheld Point of Care Ultrasound (PoCUS).

Outline map of BC with the following location pins: Fort Nelson, Hazelton, Terrace, Fort St. James, Prince George, Invermere, Campbell River, St Paul's Hospital, Elkford, and Greenwood

Dr. Lupu lives and works in Fort Nelson, a community way up north on the highway to Yukon. There are a lot of car accidents and it’s almost 400 kilometres to the nearest CT scanner. “There’s no help here: it’s just us. Our handheld ultrasound is a high-tech bridge that closes the vast distances between our patients and the care they need.”

Closer to home, physicians at St. Paul’s Hospital have been able to provide informed second opinions and expert analyses of PoCUS images taken by their colleagues across BC.

Case in point, Dr. Rob Moss, physician lead of echocardiography. “It’s very challenging to get useful images during a heart ultrasound,” he says. “But with a little coaching from me, Dr. Tracy Morton in Haida Gwaii did it. We examined and diagnosed his patient together even though we were almost 1,000 kilometres apart!” Read the whole exciting story here.

Thanks to you and PoCUS, physicians, midwives, and caregivers in remote communities right across BC are delivering (pun intended!) innovative, big city care to countless patients, residents, and families.

As we wrap up this very special 25th Lights of Hope, know that every gift – your gift – has made a difference.

Your support makes it possible to help patients and caregivers across BC! Thank you!

~ Dr. Ioana Lupu