The total hours spent offloading ambulances at the Chatham hospital increased over 150 per cent over the last year, but administration is confident they can figure out a solution.
The findings were presented at the Erie St. Clair Local Health Integration Network (LHIN) board meeting on Wednesday. The Chatham-Kent Health Alliance (CKHA) spent 617 hours offloading in 2017, a number that jumped to 1,577 hours in 2018. The increase was alarming enough that the hospital hired an offloading nurse whose sole purpose is to help get patients off ambulances and into beds or stretchers so paramedics can get to other calls.
CKHA Vice President Lisa Northcott said aside from hiring the nurse, the hospital has been trying whatever it can to reduce offload times.
"We have been working very closely with EMS to come up with strategies to decrease those times," Northcott said. "Obviously when patients are waiting on stretchers ambulances can't get out and meet the needs of the community. We have been working with [paramedics] to offload patients more efficiently."
According to the vice president, the main contributing factor to the spike in offload time was a huge surge in patients arriving by ambulance. The average wait time for patients to get out of the ambulance once they arrived was 40 minutes in 2018, almost double from 2017 where patients were only waiting 23 minutes. Northcott said since the offload nurse started on January 28, the offloading has decreased to around 25 minutes, but that still isn't quite good enough.
"We'd like to be able to get it down another 10 minutes," Northcott said. "We'd like to be seeing offload times of no longer than 15 minutes. That's our target."
Northcott added total visits to the emergency room actually decreased in 2018. She reiterated that having more patients taking ambulances is causing higher traffic for paramedics to be able to offload and that is where the nurse is really coming in handy. She said the nurse works 12 hours shifts during the busiest times. Northcott added on a positive note, the fact more people are arriving via ambulance combined with the number of visits to the ER going down means that more people are seeking emergency services who really need it.
The vice president didn't want to discourage people from seeking medical attention but said there is a way for the public to help ease the flow in the emergency room.
"If they are able to get an appointment with their family doctor instead of coming to the emergency room if their condition doesn't require emergency services, that would help decrease the number of people accessing the emergency department," Northcott said.
According to officials with the Erie St. Clair LHIN, the offload nurse was one of the two new positions added from the $300,000 surge fund the CKHA received in December.
