An official with Alberta Health Services says Red Deer Regional Hospital Centre has not yet had to implement a plan to discharge or move patients to reduce wait times in its emergency department.
A new provincial overcapacity plan came into effect on Dec. 20 to reduce wait-times to under eight hours for emergency patients who need beds and to have those who haven’t been admitted treated and released within four hours.
In Red Deer, the average wait time for admitted patients was 9.4 hours in November, 8.2 hours in December and 9.1 hours for the first 13 days in January.
Sylvia Barron, director of emergency and critical care at the Red Deer hospital, said the December and January wait times didn’t trigger the overcapacity plan. In order to trigger the plan, five patients at one time need to be waiting for an inpatient bed for longer than eight hours and there has to be no beds left in emergency to treat those critically ill or injured.
Other triggers under Alberta Health Services protocols are when the percentage of patients in emergency exceeds 110 per cent; more than 35 per cent of emergency department care spaces are blocked due to patients awaiting admission, diagnostics or consults; no emergency department space is available for new urgent patients; inpatient hospital beds are all occupied; and EMS resources are strained and could affect response times.
“We haven’t met any of the triggers. We are just continuing to monitor on a daily basis,” Barron said on Monday.
“We’ll see what January brings us.”
Since December, hospitals in Edmonton activated overcapacity protocols 20 times and in Calgary 11 times.
The average number of patients waiting for a bed in Red Deer on a daily basis was 10 in September, 11 in October, 6.8 in November and 5.7 in December.
Barron said occupancy is typically lower during the Christmas season so the drop in patients could have been due to the holiday season.
People with influenza only started showing up at the hospital on the weekend, she said.
Officials in Red Deer and across the Central Alberta zone of Alberta Health Services are going to meet on a regular basis to come up with ways to address the wait-time for hospital beds before the plan needs to be triggered.
“It’s much more complicated than having the protocols in place. We’re continuing to work on it.”
When it comes to ensuring people who don’t need to be admitted are treated and released within four hours, Red Deer is still “well under” the four-hour target, Barron said.
In November, people were treated and released in an average of 2.35 hours in November and 2.5 hours in December.
szielinski@www.reddeeradvocate.com