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New measures help reduce wait at Lakeshore General
Alycia Ambroziak
The Gazette
Thursday, May 29, 2008
The Lakeshore General Hospital’s emergency room waiting time has decreased drastically over the past two months.
Although the average waiting time for ER
patients on stretchers waiting to be admitted to a room in the 255-bed hospital last year was a dismal 25 hours, that time has now been reduced to 19.3 hours.
The reason?
According to spokesman Louis-Pascal Cyr, measures adopted at the hospital, including making some single rooms into doubles as well as renting rooms from a nearby nursing home, have finally made a difference in the ER, which has a 31-stretcher capacity.
“In April of last year, our waiting time was 25.6 hours. This year, the waiting time was 22.6 hours in April,” he said. “And since March of this year, the waiting time was 19.3 hours, compared to 27.2 hours for the same period last year.”
Cyr also credited teamwork among hospital staff, who are working with the McKinsey & Company management consultant firm, for the reduction in ER waiting time.
“The past two months have seen vast improvements,” Cyr said.
In March, the Agence de Santé de Montréal, the health department’s governing body for the Montreal region, approved the lease of 15 beds at the private Vivalis convalescence centre in Pointe Claire, located next to the hospital on
Stillview Rd. In addition, the Agence de Santé
approved funding for 10 patients requiring intensive home-care services who would otherwise have had to stay in the hospital.
Cyr said, however, that more chronic-care
facilities are needed in the West Island.
“There are patients at the hospital who should be in a long-term or chronic-care facility, but there is nowhere for them to go,” he said.
According to the Agence de Santé, the West Island needs an additional 113 long-term beds. Cyr said there are now 507 long-term beds in various facilities throughout the region.
Statistics are not kept for waiting periods for ambulatory patients who go to the ER but who do not need stretchers.