Wait times at regional hospital below provincial average: Report

Patients seeking treatment at the Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre’s emergency department face wait times for an initial physician assessment that are significantly shorter than the provincial average.

But with the good news comes the bad.

On average admitted patients are spending much longer time in the emergency department than the Ontario norm, a fact acting CEO Mark Henderson blames on the hospital’s ongoing gridlock situation.

To get initial wait times down, Henderson said the hospital has initiated a number of measures aimed at speeding up the flow of patients through the emergency department.

Not an easy task, he added.

“I think you know this is either the busiest or second-busiest emergency department in Ontario, if not Canada. There are several things we’ve concentrated on. One of them is the off-load time from ambulances,” Henderson said.

“We have one of the shortest off-load times in the province.”

Rather than have these patients – who happen to be the sickest of the sick – waiting on the ambulance in the care of paramedics until a bed was found, they are immediately processed, assessed and treated, Henderson said.

“That frees up the ambulance to get back to its regular duties. If you go to other hospitals, there might be several ambulances lined up outside with patients still on the ambulance stretcher. So it’s a double benefit here,” he said.

A second area of concentration was the rapid-assessment unit, which deals with less sick patients.

“It’s anticipated they won’t need admissions, so they are assessed quickly. Whatever has to be done is done and they’re discharged, and that speeds up the overall flow of patients, so they’re kind of triaged into the correct areas,” Henderson said.

“I think it’s worth emphasizing very sick patients, when they come in, they don’t wait 2.2 hours. They wait 2.2 minutes. They’re immediately into one of our trauma rooms and those patients are dealt with literally within minutes of their presentation.”

The average wait time in Ontario is about three hours.

When it comes to total time spent in the emergency, interim CEO Bill McCready said the results were expected.

“This isn’t a surprise, due to our ongoing overcapacity situation, which creates a bottleneck of patients flowing from the emergency department to an in-patient unit,” McCready said in a release issued on Wednesday by the hospital.

“Although we have improved, this remains an area of concern. We continue to work closely with our system partners to address the root-cause issues such as the availability of health-care services in the community.”

Henderson added he’s hopeful the opening next year of the Centre of Excellence for Integrated Seniors Services.