ER waits longer as hospitals restructure

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This article was published 30/10/2019 (1786 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Call it short-term pain for long-term gain.

That’s the explanation for a rise in emergency department and urgent care wait times at Winnipeg Regional Health Authority hospitals in September.

“We have many new teams who are learning to work together,” Réal Cloutier, the WRHA’s president and CEO said Thursday when the WRHA provided an update on clinical consolidation and hospital reorganization which included the closure of three emergency rooms.

Changes in the health care system have been “necessary but undeniably disruptive,” Cloutier admitted.

In September, the median wait time at an ER or urgent care centre across the city was 2.07 hours, compared to 1.87 hours in August and 1.5 hours in September 2018. The Canadian median wait time is 1.2 hours. Concordia and Seven Oaks hospitals, where emergency departments were turned into urgent care centres, both saw waits increase by at least half an hour.

“Staff across the region are adjusting to new schedules, new units, new positions and, in some cases, working in new hospitals and under new employers,” said Cloutier, who thanked nurses, doctors and hospital staff several times at the press conference.

Across the WRHA, the longest wait time for nine out of 10 patients was 5.33 hours in September, 4.87 hours in August and just 4.0 hours in September 2018.

“Our wait times are not where we want them to be,” said Krista Williams, the WRHA’s chief of nursing and health operations. Improving them requires unblocking access to the ER that gets clogged by a domino effect when people are waiting to be discharged, waiting for tests, waiting for home care and waiting to be admitted. “We want patients seen, treated and discharged or admitted in a timely way,” she said.

Cloutier reminded Winnipeggers why the health care system overhaul was needed in the first place, and pointed to some positive results.

“We’re seeing a reduced number of patients in hospitals awaiting placement in a personal care home and the number of patients moving home from hospital more quickly using targeted strategies,” said the WRHA boss who is 60 years old and plans to retire by the end of the year.

The number of days spent in hospital by “alternate level of care patients” — those who don’t require acute care services in hospital and could receive care at home or in long-term care — has been reduced by 46 per cent since April 2017 when the major overhaul of health care services began.

“I will call this out as being really a historic reduction in the number of alternate level of care patients in our hospitals,” Cloutier said.

The weekly number of patients receiving health care services at home rather than in hospital rose to 234 in September from 99 a year earlier, Williams said.

With the last major “healing our health system” change happening in September when the intensive care unit at Seven Oaks closed, the WRHA is now honing in on stabilizing the system and filling nursing vacancies, said Williams.

In September, the shortage of full-time nurses needed at hospital emergency rooms and urgent care centres was down to 16.5 per cent from 21.8 per cent in August. The WRHA is focused on finding more efficient processes and practices to post and fill nursing positions, Williams said.

Thursday’s update on health services consolidation was “worrying,” NDP health critic Uzoma Asagwara said in a prepared statement.

“Wait times are up across the city, there are more than 130 fewer beds in our hospitals and nurse vacancies are skyrocketing. This is an indictment of Mr. Pallister’s health care agenda and yet his government is continuing to make more cuts across the system.”

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca