By Joel Wiebe
Kawartha Lakes This Week
PETERBOROUGH, Canada — There’s been a dramatic drop in the amount of time EMS staff spend off-loading patients at the hospital.
Ambulance staff have to wait for their patients to be admitted at the hospital before they can return to duty to respond to new calls.
In January, EMS logged 406 hours of offload time. For March, they logged a mere 148 hours and cut response times county-wide by two minutes. There were a total of 173 offloads lasting more than a half hour in January, 16 of which were more than four hours. In March there were only 50 offloads longer than a half hour, all under four hours.
“The trend is continuing,” says Randy Mellow, deputy chief of EMS. “We’re cautiously optimistic.
Colleen Armstrong, emergency department manager at Peterborough Regional Health Centre (PRHC), says the volume of EMS patients hasn’t dropped, crediting the drop to keeping an offload nurse position staffed in the hours the Province funds as well a general improvement in efficiency in the department.
They still struggle to find beds due to an abundance of long-term care patients waiting at the hospital for beds to open in nursing homes, but they’ve found some creative ways to efficiently use the available beds.
“We’re really pleased,” says MPP Jeff Leal, extending credit to greater co-operation between all parties involved.
He says PRHC’s new CEO, Ken Tremblay, has brought his own experience with the issue to the hospital.
Deputy Chief Mellow says the improvement won’t necessarily result in a big budget drop, though less overtime will need to be paid, but benefit for the community is better service.
Volume of calls is pretty steady year-round, which add up to about 10,000 to PRHC each year.
Though staff are typically in good spirits, Deputy Chief Mellow says they’re happy to not being waiting as long at the hospital.
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