90th anniversary flashback: Hospital@Home transforms the home into a virtual ward

As the JGH’s 90^th anniversary approaches, JGH News today looks back at: 

• The 2022 launch of the Hospital@Home program
• The best dressed team of tiny healthcare staff
• Samuel S. Cohen, founding Executive Director of the JGH
• Placing phone calls in a pre-digital age 

Four new archival items appear every Tuesday in the 90 days leading up to the 90^th anniversary on October 8. Everything that’s been published so far can be found in the JGH News archive.

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With the launch of Hospital@Home in February 2022, the JGH became the first healthcare facility in Quebec—and one of the very few in Canada—where certain patients can finish their recovery at home, while being monitored continuously and remotely via digital technology.

Although the patient’s location undergoes a major shift, he or she is not discharged from the hospital. Rather, the patient is now in a virtual ward whose real-life setting happens to be his or her home.

The goal is to enhance the patient’s recuperation by having it take place in comfortable, familiar surroundings. At the same time, the patient’s risk of acquiring a hospital-borne infection is reduced, and a hospital bed is freed up more promptly for a patient who urgently needs it.

Hospital@Home, which has since gone on to win several major awards for innovation, was a major step forward in the development of a broader Virtual Ward program by CIUSSS West-Central Montreal.

In addition, it is perhaps the most striking example of “Care Everywhere”, the CIUSSS’s over-all philosophy of care. This approach involves providing healthcare users with the right care and at the right time in the location that is most appropriate, safest and most convenient for them.

Originally known as COVID@Home, the program began as a pilot project during the pandemic. It enabled certain COVID-19 patients to leave the hospital, but to continue being monitored, when their hospitalization was nearly at an end.

The results were so promising that COVID@Home evolved into Hospital@Home, encompassing a wider range of patients. Among them are those with heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, pneumonia, urinary tract infections and cellulitis.

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The JGH’s best dressed team of tiny healthcare staff

Ossana Zeitounian, seamstress extraordinaire, in 2009 with a few of the dozens of dolls for which she sewed healthcare related uniforms.

There’s no doubt as to which of the JGH’s many healthcare teams is the best dressed. Its members—more than 100 strong—are just 15 to 30 centimetres tall and are based in a pair of display cases in the first-floor passageway between Pavilions C and G.

They’re impeccably dressed dolls, a product of the creative vision and nimble fingers of Ossana Zeitounian, a beloved former JGH Housekeeping employee. To mark the 50^th anniversary of the hospital in 1984, Ms. Zeitounian hand‑crafted each tiny article of clothing and presented the fully clad dolls to the JGH as a gift.

Included in the array are doctors, nurses, orderlies and other types of healthcare workers dressed in exact replicas of JGH uniforms of decades past. So precise is the detail that several dolls have the varying uniforms that student nurses wore at different stages in their education at the JGH School of Nursing during the 1950s and ’60s.

Ms. Zeitounian, who retired in 1993 after 23 years’ service, learned her basic skills from her father, who was a tailor, and from her mother, a dressmaker, while growing up not far from Beirut, Lebanon. Later, she refined her abilities by taking courses in France and Armenia, and eventually emigrated to Argentina and finally to Canada.

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Samuel S. Cohen, founding Executive Director

As the founding Executive Director of the fledgling JGH, Samuel S. Cohen (1900-2000) was instrumental in helping to transform a small, local healthcare institution—geared largely to serving the Jewish community—into a major university teaching hospital.

Mr. Cohen was born in New York City where, as a young man, he rose to the position of of Assistant Director of the Beth Israel Hospital. In 1933, he accepted an offer to move to Montreal to assume the role of Superintendent (equivalent of Executive Director) of the as‑yet unopened Jewish General Hospital.

Mr. Cohen had the extremely difficult but ultimately rewarding task of recruiting the JGH’s initial team of highly skilled medical staff, nursing personnel and other healthcare professionals.

The hospital’s earliest years were especially difficult, since Mr. Cohen was guiding a brand new institution during the Depression and, shortly thereafter, World War II. This was followed by a period of explosive growth in the post-war years.

After his retirement in 1967 and for the rest of his life, Mr. Cohen maintained close ties with the JGH. In 1994, in recognition of his enormous contribution in helping to “give birth” to the hospital, he was chosen to receive first Distinguished Service Award, the JGH’s highest honour.

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Placing phone calls in a pre-digital age

During the first several decades of the 20^th century, when digital telecommunication was still undreamt-of, the JGH (like many large companies and organizations) relied on platoons of patient, quick-thinking switchboard operators to ensure that thousands of daily phone calls were properly routed.

And speaking of old-fashioned telephones, when was the last time you saw an antique phone booth with a wooden frame, folding door and seat? If you’re under 40 (or maybe even under 50), probably never. However, two of these booths can still be found on the second floor of Pavilion B, right across from the elevator.

This kind of phone booth, the ultimate in private, comfortable, pre-digital communication, used to be fairly common. However, it began to disappear in the early 1960s when cheaper, stripped‑down telephone kiosks started taking over. Today, pay phones have been rendered redundant by the the cell phone.

If you drop by for a look at the booths in Pavilion B, don’t expect to make any calls for nickel or to use a phone with a rotary dial. Sadly, none of the old equipment remains because, after all, this is 2024, not 1954.