John Langer, Seaside FM News | February 26th, 2025
The new Deanne Reeve Pelvic Health Suite – the first of it’s kind in Atlantic Canada – had its grand opening at the Dartmouth General Hospital on Tuesday.
“This is going to quadruple the volume of procedures that we’re doing – more than quadruple the number of procedures, and for women’s health this is going to be exceptional” said Stephen Harding, CEO of the Dartmouth General Hospital Foundation.
“We’ve had some incredible physicians join us from the US, and in the US they do a lot of these procedures in an outpatient setting, so patients walk in and leave within 15 minutes or a half an hour.”
The new 1,750 square foot facility will support patients through a multidisciplinary approach. This means that specialists from all across the hospital will be brought together to ensure faster diagnosis and treatments. These specialists include urologists, pelvic floor therapists and more. This new facility will improve access for care for Nova Scotians and free up valuable resources within the hospital.
For example, a hysteroscopy is a procedure performed two days a week. When at full capacity, 20 cases over two days per week could be treated, equaling around 1,000 a year. With the new facility, this number quadruples, and alleviates pressure from other areas of the hospital such as the main operating room, which will now see an extra 250 hours a year of surgical space, as well as more than 500 hours for endoscopies and operating suite time.
“In the past these procedures were done in the operating room and some of them in the endoscopy suite. So we’ve had some incredible physicians join us from the US, and in the US they do a lot of these procedures in an outpatient setting, so patients walk in and leave within 15 minutes or a half an hour” said Stephen Harding.
The Deanne Reeve Pelvic Health Suite is named after Deanne Reeve, a Nova Scotian woman who passed away in 2020 from cervical cancer. In 2023 at the Inaugural Orchid Gala, an event established by Reeves’ friends Sheri Morgan and Liz Rigney to honour the memory of Reeve, raised $500,000 after a match donation from Steele Auto Group for the new facility. In recognition of the large donation, the DGHF named the facility in Reeve’s honour.
The Province of Nova Scotia is also providing funding for the new facility.
