Wait times at the Accident & Emergency department (A& E) of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH) should soon be drastically reduced once the hospital enacts its 2025-2028 strategic plan.
During a media conference yesterday in the QEH’s boardroom, Martindale’s Road, St Michael, chief executive officer Neil Clark said some of the issues within the A& E were not directly related to it.
“The waits in the A& E department are too long and we do need to address those [but] the A& E department’s just a bottleneck for the whole system. Delays in A& E are not because of A& E, they’re because of the whole system.
“If people are choosing to [only] go to A& E, the demand for A& E will be higher than what we can manage. So, therefore, we have to increase the capacity to manage that,” he said.
Clark said this was exactly what their strategic plan would handle – increased staffing, more equipment and better training.
“So within the strategy, there’s a number of things in the service delivery module which will support A& E. Part of that is additional staffing, nurses and doctors, to support the A& E department. Another part of it is about having access to diagnostics close by.
“We have a CT scanner in the department, and we should be getting that up and running by next week. We’re also going to have an X-ray machine in the A& E, which means the patients there won’t have to go out searching for diagnostics. It’ll be right there. There are also plans to train more nurses to do advanced triage within the department,” he said.
Digital system
The administrator said a major part of the upcoming upgrades was the digital health information system which would offer many benefits to the A& E department.
“We have to manage the patient flow through the hospital beds and the health information system will allow us to track where every patient is in the hospital and what they’re waiting for.
“We need to eliminate any wait times that are of no value to the patients. So if you’re waiting for your blood work to be analysed, I understand why you’re waiting, but if they’ve been analysed, and now you’re just waiting for another doctor to come and see you at some point in the future, there’s no value in that wait.
“We need to track and use the health information system to find out where those delays in waits are.
“That means we have to work closely with the wards to make sure we can get patients moving through those wards and not just waiting in a ward with no actual treatment,” he said.
The CEO said this was where the bed optimisation plan would kick in, guiding how they utilised bed space, how and where patients were to be discharged and what outpatient care they would need.
“So all these things will become available to us in real-time with that health information system. And I think that will allow us then to drive through and reduce the length of stay for patients and release more beds to the A& E department.” ( CA)
