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Friday, June 28, 2019 | Your community newspaper since 1916

Telehealth service benefits local teen Mark NIELSEN Citizen staff mnielsen@pgcitizen.ca Life for a Prince George teen fitted with a special kind of hearing aid has just become notably easier – and a bit of medical history has been made in the process. On Thursday, Lily Palmer, 13, was able to have her cochlear implants checked at University Hospital of Northern British Columbia. Normally, she would have had to make the eight-and-a-half-hour drive to Vancouver and meet faceto-face with an audiologist at the B.C. Children’s Hospital. But with the help of video conferencing technology, called telehealth, the audiologist was able to sit at a laptop at BCCH and take over the implant’s programming software and make the adjustments from nearly 800 kilometres away. It marked the launch of Canada’s first ongoing remote clinical service for people with cochlear implants. “A service like this for what already is an amazing technology is pretty cool,” Lily’s mother, Andrea said. “Lily basically plugs into software, (audiologist Raegan Bergstrom) can read her ears, as we call them, from Vancouver and do all the fundamental testing that she needs to do from a technological point of view.” Essentially an array of electrodes, a cochlear implant is placed in the ear’s cochlea. It bypasses the normal hearing process and, with the help of a magnet and a processor placed outside behind the ear, the patient can hear sounds digitally. Instead of being deaf, the patient is simply hard of hearing. Lily’s implants were put in place when she was one year old and for the next two years she had to be brought down to Vancouver every two months to get them assessed. “In her toddler years, it was a ton of travel and we’re lucky in that I have family in the Lower Mainland, we can stay with them,” Andrea said. “But for an average family that doesn’t, it’s the gas, the food, the

CITIZEN PHOTO BY BRENT BRAATEN

Lilly Palmer, left, along with her mom Andrea consult with Raegan Bergstrom, an audiologist from B.C. Children’s Hospital. Bergstrom can remotely tune Lilly’s cochlear implants without having to meet in person. accommodation. “When she was really little, we tried to fly a few times just because it’s hard to drive with a baby for eight-and-a-half hours. So telehealth, in this capacity, is a huge saver.” Lily will still need to travel down to Vancouver once a year, but that’s still down from the four trips a year she had been making. A key piece of the video conferencing is a clear picture to allow Lily to lip read while the outside processor is out – and it came in crystal clear on Wednesday. The session was the culmination

of more than a year of planning and testing. “It’s pretty awesome,” Lily said during an interview with Lower Mainland media via the conferencing system. “I’ve never had a video chat this clear. I’ve facetimed with my friends who live just a few minutes away and it’s so glitchy and you guys are all the way in Vancouver and it’s not glitchy at all. It’s great.” Until she pulls back her hair, the implants are not at all noticeable. Barring any serious bumps to the head, the internal implants remain

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in place for a lifetime. As for the external pieces, Lily is now on her fourth generation as the technology has improved. With the help of a waterproof cover, she can swim. She also plays ringette and because she’s had the implants since she was so young, she speaks without an accent. Hearing in a crowd can still be a problem. She needs to pass around a mini-microphone to carry on a conversation. Her ringette coach also uses the microphone to tell her when to get on and off the ice.

Developer keen on Prince George prospects Frank O’BRIEN Glacier Media Developer Frank Quinn says incentives provided by the City of Prince George were appreciated but the city’s potential would likely have been enough to convince him to build the first modern strata housing complex in the downtown core. Kamloops-based A&T Project Developments, of which Quinn is a partner, is constructing the phased Park House development, a condominium project of four four-storey buildings next to city hall. The first phase of 36 units saw 16 pre-sales while still in the framing stage. The condos are selling for about $350 per square foot. “We like Prince George,” Quinn said, noting that A&T built the 160-unit RiverBend seniors’ housing rental project in the city three years ago. Under a developer incentive program that Prince George started in 2011, A&T was allowed a 10-year break on municipal property taxes for Park House and the city sold the land for the project at appraised value. The site is ideal, Quinn said. It will be among the anchors for a substantial downtown redevelopment that includes the existing city hall and Prince George convention centre, the Wood Innovation and Design Centre and a new swimming pool, sports centre and green space.

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Workers use a crane to place large pieces of metal at the construction site of the Park House condominium development in May. It is part of a “common realm” plan meant to transform the downtown into a walkable,

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inviting space for residents and shoppers. Approached by the city, which

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was interested in creating more housing in the core, A&T soon hired the architects behind Wesbrook Village at the University of British Columbia to ensure the project would be built to the latest standards. “Most of the condo projects in Prince George are older. Park House will be the first contemporary new homes in the downtown,” Quinn said. The complex will offer underground parking, the first in downtown Prince George and will include electric-vehicle charging stations, as well as such perks as a yoga studio and fitness room. Quinn expects the condos to sell well, noting that pre-sales have gone better than expected. “Prince George is not traditionally a pre-sale market,” he said. “Buyers are more likely to buy a finished product.” No commercial space was included in Park House he said, because the downtown site is ringed with shops and services. Planning for Park House began before the final investment decision for LNG Canada’s $40 billion liquefied natural gas terminal was even made, but that project, along with the approved $4.5 billion Trans Mountain oil pipeline, is likely among the reasons why Prince George is attracting more real estate investments. In the first quarter of this year, for instance, 257 homes sold in the city, worth $90 million, up

from $82.2 million in sales volume at the same time last year. The median detached-house price is up about 10 per cent from 2018, at $327,500, according to the BC Northern Real Estate Board. As of the end of December 2018, total building permits in Prince George reached $186 million, up from $116 million a year earlier. In the first quarter of 2019, building permit values topped $26 million. Melissa Barcellos, Prince George’s manager of economic development, said that the city will benefit directly from oil and gas pipeline development. The Trans Mountain oil pipeline from Alberta to the Lower Mainland, which was expected to receive federal government approval in June, runs quite close to the city, she noted. “As the biggest city in the north, Prince George will naturally attract a lot of the business associated with LNG Canada as well,” Barcellos said. Among the major investments is the new, 174-room Courtyard Marriott Hotel, which opened a year ago in the downtown. Under construction is a 95-room downtown hotel by Mundi Hotel Enterprises Inc. and modular builder Horizon North Logistics Inc. It will replace the old Days Inn that will be demolished to make way for the new pool. — see STUDENT, page 3

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