Dragon Boat Festival - Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada

2010

This year's Festival will raise funds for equipment to support Minimally Invasive Spine Surgery. With the purchase of a Fluoroscopy C-Arm and MIS Instrumentation, coupled with the expansion to the Extended Day Surgery Program, the Orthopaedics Department at St. Joe's will be in a position to more than double the number of spine procedures done here each year. This new equipment will allow Surgeons to minimize incision length, reduce tissue manipulation, resulting in less post-operative pain and faster recovery times.

St. Joseph 's Hospital provides Day Surgery Services for the population of South Western New Brunswick. The purchase of these two important pieces of Spinal Surgery equipment, at a total cost of $232,000 will allow patients to return to their normal activities much earlier and will dramatically improve patient outcomes.

2009

This year we will celebrate the 5 th anniversary of the Saint John Dragon Boat Festival and we've taken on a very exciting project. Our goal will be to raise the $250,000 needed to transform a portion of our inner-city property into a Wellness Garden and Sanctuary of our patients and their families.

Four of the nine floors here at St. Joe's are currently occupied by our Health and Aging patients. Their stay can be as short as three weeks for cognitive assessment or as long as three to six months for treatment, rehabilitation or transition. Regardless of their length of stay, the Wellness Garden will offer our patients the opportunity to enjoy the outdoors as part of their therapy or to simply visit with their loved ones in a relaxing environment.

Being able to go outside to feel the sunshine or check on your garden is something we all take or granted but for some people it's only a memory. We would like to provide a space so that for a least a little while, our patients can relax and forget they are confined to a hospital, “A space within the hospital that doesn't feel like the hospital”.

With your help, together we can create that sanctuary and give all of our patients at St. Joseph 's Hospital a little piece of home.

2008

The Saint John Dragon Boat Festival is a fundraising project of St. Joseph’s Hospital Foundation. This year the goal of the Festival will be to raise $250,000 to expand the Extended Day Surgery Program at St. Joseph’s Hospital. Currently there is a challenge in the Day Surgery Unit to accommodate surgical procedures that require an extended length of stay (4-6 hours). With improvements in technology, procedures that once needed over-night hospital stays now qualify as Extended Day Surgery Procedures, saving time and resources as well as reducing wait times for patients from Sussex to St. Stephen.

St. Joseph’s Hospital Extended Day Surgery program will include procedures ranging from General Surgery, Orthopedic Surgery, Breast Surgery and Urodynamic Surgery.

Your support will allow St. Joseph’s to expand the excellent patient care our community has come to rely on.

2007

The goal for the 2007 Festival was to raise $224,000 for three different projects within St. Joseph’s Hospital. Once again our teams, sponsors, and especially our donors came through by exceeded this goal and raising a total of $252,000, bringing our three year combined total to over $750,000.

The 2007 Projects were:

Flexible Sigmoidscope:
Colorectal cancer is third in overall incidents and number of deaths each year. It develops slowly and occurs most often in people over 50. If detected and with early treatment, the five year survival rate is approximately 92% and is often curable. Presently over 600 patients a year are seen in the Proctology Clinic at St. Joseph’s. With the recent addition of a new physician and an aging population, it is anticipated that the number of patients being screened will increase.
Optical Coherence Tomography Machine:

St. Joseph’s is home to the only Eye Centre in New Brunswick offering a complete range of eye testing, diagnostic and laser treatments. Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) is a new noninvasive, no contact imaging technology that captures a scan of the retina, similar to a biopsy. This technology is critical for patients suffering from retinal disease. Currently patients must travel to Bathurst or Halifax for treatment. An OCT machine for St. Joseph’s will provide health care close to home.

Video Urodynamics Equipment:
Bladder dysfunction can be embarrassing, painfully disruptive and complex. It can affect patients at any age. Video Urodynamic equipment is used to diagnose bladder dysfunction in men, women, and children of all ages.

2006

The Saint John Dragon Boat Festival is a fundraising project of St. Joseph’s Hospital Foundation. Your generous donations allow us to fund these worthwhile projects as well as continue our support of the services and programs offered at St. Joseph’s Hospital.

The goal of the 2006 Saint John Dragon Boat Festival was to raise $200,000 to purchase a new Breast Health Ultrasound Machine. Thanks to a partnership between St. Joseph’s Hospital Foundation, Atlantic Health Sciences Corporation, and GE Healthcare, patients at St. Joseph’s Hospital can now benefit from three new Ultrasound Units.

One unit will be located in the Women’s Health Centre while the other two units will be used in the main Diagnostic Imaging Department. The new ultrasound equipment uses a medical imaging technique called Volume Ultrasound. This helps physicians to quickly and precisely perform general imaging in a broad range of clinical applications from breast and abdominal to vascular imaging. “With this new technology, we can rotate, zoom, colorize, create new views and otherwise manipulate the raw scan data that was collected to evaluate the anatomy and surrounding tissues to rule out any concerns” states Dr. John Allan, AHSC Radiologist. Thank you to the 2006 Saint John Dragon Boat Teams and their generous supporters.

2005

The first ever Saint John Dragon Boat Festival was held on August 27, 2005 at the Renforth Park in Rothesay, New Brunswick. Our goal was to raise the $100,000 plus, needed to purchase a new Mammography Machine for the Women’s Health Centre located at St. Joseph’s Hospital. Forty Five teams and over 1000 people came together that day and surpassed our goal by raising total of $171,000. As well, through a generous grant from the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation, an additional $125,000 was donated to make the grand total for the 2005 Saint John Dragon Boat Festival $296,000.

Through the hard work of our dragon boat teams and the generosity of the CBCF, St. Joseph’s Hospital Foundation was able to move our Breast Health Program into the “digital age” and purchase not only a new mammography machine, but a digital stereotactic biopsy device that will allow staff to carry out mammographic biopsies efficiently and with greater accuracy. St. Joseph’s Hospital Foundation would like to thank the thousands of people that made the first Saint John Dragon Boat Festival such a huge success. To the 45 teams, over 100 volunteers, the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation and it’s donors, the over 7000 people who came out to take in the festival, and most of all, to those of you who so generously donated to the 2005 Saint John Dragon Boat Festival, THANK YOU!