PEMBROKE – “We’ve really turned the corner,” says Pierre Noel, the President and CEO of Pembroke Regional Hospital, referring to the great results PRH’s emergency department has been experiencing.
PRH has recently been rated in the top 20 percent of high volume emergency departments in Ontario by the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care’s ED Pay for Results (P4R) program.
“Like many hospital emergency departments across the province, we’ve seen very high numbers of patients coming through the ED for a number of years and we’ve been challenged to move people through as quickly as they hoped or expected,” Mr. Noel said. “Some of this, of course, is due to the way that emergency departments work, seeing the sickest patients first which means that, sometimes, the less urgent cases, and the people most anxious to come and go quickly, need to wait until these life-saving efforts are dealt with.”
Mr. Noel credits the turnaround in PRH’s emergency department performance to the hard work of the hospital’s physicians and staff in finding new and innovative ways to reduce wait times and improve efficiencies.
“That work which included the opening in 2012 of a separate area called ‘Zone B’ for lower acuity patients presenting to the ED and the initiation of ‘Lean’ process improvement strategies throughout the Hospital in 2013 has really paid off,” he said.
Francois Lemaire, Vice-President of Patient Services – Acute Care and Chief Nursing Executive, added, “We’ve been able to make great strides over the last five years thanks to Lean – so much so that we are now ranked 15th out of 74 high volume hospital emergency departments and we are the best performer within the Champlain Local Health Integration Network.”
The ranking given to PRH is part of the P4R program which was launched in 2008 in order to address ED wait time challenges among high volume emergency departments (those with 30,000 or more visits per year) by providing funding for hospitals with improved performance.
The funding each hospital receives through the program is used to support the planning and implementation of local solutions to reduce ED length of stay, increase patient access to quality health services, and improve the patient experience.
“Through this program we are not only compared with other hospitals, but with ourselves as well, and we are being rewarded financially for our improved performance,” Mr. Lemaire said.
Thanks to the work that has been done and the continued engagement by staff and physicians, PRH has been able to achieve a greater than 50 per cent reduction in wait time for patients being admitted to hospital through the ED, typically the sickest patients.
For the less urgent patients, those who are treated and then go home, the time from being assessed by the triage nurse to being discharged has been reduced by over one and a half hours bringing the wait time for people in our community to well below the provincial average of other Ontario hospitals.
“We’re very proud of these results,” said Dr. Tom Hurley, Chief of the PRH Emergency Department, “and our challenge now is to sustain the gains we have made and to maintain our excellent performance.”
“Our ultimate goal is for our patients to get great care when they come to our ED and to make sure that this is delivered as efficiently as possible in a friendly and caring environment” he said.
