THUNDER BAY - The Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre has been experiencing surge capacity for more than a month, but hospital officials say overall the gridlock situation is improving.
Since Sept. 7, the hospital has been at surge capacity, formally referred to as gridlock.
Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre executive vice president, Dr. Mark Henderson, said an increase in patients is typical for this time of year.
“Typically the hospital is busier in the fall and the winter than it is in the spring and the summer,” he said.
“During the summer we have operating rooms closed to allow people to take vacation, both nurses and surgeons, so after Labour Day when everybody comes back to work as it were, we typically see the number of patients in the hospital go up.”
Despite the state of surge capacity, Henderson said when looking at the big picture, the situation at the hospital has been improving.
“Over the last three years we have made considerable efforts internally to shorten our average length of stay,” Henderson said. “We’re actually admitting more patients than we were before, because we can do so now, because we have been able to shorten the length of stay for patients.”
The average length of stay at the hospital per patient is 5.8 days. Henderson explained the goal is to reduce that number to 4.8 days, or a 0.2 per day per patient reduction per year.
Henderson said that while it does not sound like very much, if the number is reduced by 0.2 days over the course of three years, the average length of stay is reduced by 0.6 days.
“When you multiply that to our 19,000 admissions a year, it actually saves a considerable number of beds,” he said. “We have made a tremendous amount of effort to shorten the length of stays of our patients.”
“It’s mainly because of good teamwork,” Henderson added. “We have everybody thinking along the same lines and those small improvements, when you multiply it thousands of times, actually turns into quite large savings of beds. We hope next year to do another 0.2 and then after that another 0.2 and then we will be down to the Ontario average for length of stay.”
Reducing length of stay is about finding efficiencies within workflow, according to Henderson. This involves specific departments prioritizing patients awaiting tests, streamlining admissions from out of the emergency department and into wards, and discharging patients one day after procedures as opposed to two.
“In terms of discharge, we ask physicians to consider discharging one day after procedures as opposed to two which may have been tradition, but it’s quite safe to send them home one day after a procedure,” Henderson said.
There are also between 60 and 65 alternate level care patients in the Health Sciences Centre, with some waiting to enter long term care or waiting to go to St. Joseph’s Hospital for continuing care or rehabilitation.
“Some of them as a small group of patients who are very difficult to place for one reason or another and they are kind of atypical ALCs and they will always be a challenging group of patients to find appropriate accommodation for,” Henderson said.
Construction on the expansion at Hogarth Riverview Manor to add 32 long-term care beds is expected to be complete in late 2016. Henderson said those additional beds will help alleviate surge capacity at the hospital as well.
“Because St. Joseph’s has an ALC problem like every other hospital in the province, they will be able to decamp patients to Hogarth Riverview Manor and their other long term care homes and then our patients who need complex continuing care will be able to get over to St. Joes hospital, so we anticipate improvement from both angles,” he said.
