BlackburnNews.com file photo of the Chatham-Kent Health Alliance. (Photo by Jason Viau)BlackburnNews.com file photo of the Chatham-Kent Health Alliance. (Photo by Jason Viau)
Chatham

Reducing Frequent Visits To ER

The Chatham-Kent Health Alliance is teaming up with a Quebec-based company to cut wait times and improve care for frequent emergency room users.

Rebecca Handfield, operations manager with MediaMed Technologies, expects to track the reasons some people make a lot of visits.

"We're really targeting the people who are coming the most to the emergency and the most to be hospitalized," she says. "Creating care plans, creating different approaches so we can see results for this distinct community."

Hospital CEO Colin Patey says the cases can be complicated. "They are not just afflicted with one particular illness, they may have one, two, three, four, five things going on so it takes a team."

Patey says if their time in the hospital can be reduced, the quality of lives and wait times in ER would also be improved.

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