St Joe’s changes speed up ER

In the middle of one of the more severe flu seasons in memory, and with this frigid cold challenging us, St Joseph’s hospital says it’s come up with a small change that’s making a big difference for patients heading to the emergency room.

The hospital has found that stationing a doctor in the emergency room makes all the difference.

On a day like today, the hospital says it would normally have around 20 people in emergency in the afternoon. Today it was two. The hospital says it’s because they’ve changed they way they process patients so they can eliminate unnecessary waiting. They haven’t added any staff. But now they have a doctor in emergency who can see people right away, as soon as they’re admitted, and direct them to the help they need.

Dr Ian Preya explains it this way: “what we were finding is that patients would come to the emergency department with an acute problem, they would register and they would sit. In some cases they might sit for three or four hours before they were seen by a physician. What we’ve tried to do now is if the patient’s registered, we have a physician outside in the registration area who sees the patient immediately and begins their treatment.”

And they say that makes all the difference. Now, they say nobody waits for more than an hour, instead of the horror stories we’ve all heard for people waiting six or eight hours or more in hospital emergency rooms. Dr Preya says the previous system might have had more to do with what was best for work flow and staff. Now they’re looking at what’s best for patients.