If you’ve grabbed a comforting cup of coffee during a visit to Delta Hospital, maybe had someone help you find your way, or needed to buy a gift for someone who needed a lift, there’s a group of volunteers that you can thank.
And when the new Beedie Long Term Care Centre opens on the hospital grounds, the Delta Hospital Auxiliary Society will have helped with that too, thanks to a $3-million donation made at the start of the year.
Friday is Healthcare Auxiliaries Day, in B.C., as proclaimed under the authority of King Charles himself.
Newly elected president of the Delta Auxiliary, Jim Short, estimates that over the 54 years the auxiliary has been around, it’s donated close to $20 million to health care.
“Not bad from a group that started in someone’s back yard with 12 people,” he said in an email to the Optimist.
The auxiliary was founded in 1969 after Lila Massey, wife of former MLA George Massey, invited 16 women to form the Delta Hospital Women’s Group.
Short said the core of what the auxiliary does, is providing care and compassion for patients and staff.
It does so by having volunteers in Delta Hospital welcoming visitors and showing them how to get to where they’re going, by providing incidentals such as toiletries for people who end up in emergency, and helping out extended care residents with odds and ends, such as slippers or pyjamas.
The auxiliary also runs the Dogwood Gift Shop and the Courtyard Cafe, which help, not only by offering nice gifts and soothing cups of coffee and tea, but by listening to dozens of stories that can be heartbreaking or heart warming.
The cafe also helps hospital staff as well — by giving them a place to get some food and have a quiet break in the courtyard garden.
In addition to the cafe and gift shop, the auxiliary’s Thrift Shop in Ladner Village helps fundraise the money needed to support health care, including their most recent $700,000 donation for equipment purchases.
Other projects supported by the auxiliary include, funding the music therapist in extended care as well as the pastoral care chaplain, offering the Lifeline medical alert program, a health-care bursary, and the Pillow Pal program, where volunteers make pillows designed for people who’ve had mastectomies.
The latter program is popular with the pillows in high demand, Short added.
Short said his role as president is to keep delivering the services, ensure volunteers are supported and cared for, and to keep looking for ways to support health care in Delta into the future.
The Delta Hospital Auxiliary Society is part of the B.C. Association of Healthcare Auxiliaries which in 2023, raised more than $8 million for health care in B.C.
