Hospital reduces ED wait times
Monday October 22, 2007 -- Jason Thompson
By establishing a Rapid Assessment Zone (RAZ) in the emergency department at The Credit Valley Hospital in Mississauga, Janet Cadigan, nurse manager in the emergency department, says they’ve able to double and triple the number of patients seen.

The RAZ project has also earned The Credit Valley Hospital recognition as one of five finalists for the 2007 rL Solutions Canadian Healthcare Excellence in Quality Award (CHEQA).

The awards are a joint initiative between rL Solutions, a company that develops software for healthcare organizations, and the Quality Healthcare Network (QHN). The Credit Valley Hospital is one of four Healthcare Insurance Reciprocal of Canada (HIROC) subscribers to be short-listed as a finalist.

“We are really quite honoured. It was very hard work implementing this zone in our emergency department,” Cadigan says. “It’s really not about the award. It’s the fact that it provides additional opportunities for us to get different ideas out there as we learn from others.”

The goal of the program is to efficiently manage emergency department throughput of Canadian Triage Acuity Scale (CTAS) level III patients and demonstrate measurable improvement in length of stay, physician assessment times and patient satisfaction using existing space.

Cadigan says level III patients were targeted for the RAZ since they tend to languish for hours in waiting rooms.

Patients come in, they’re assessed, have medical directives initiated, some treatment is initiated and they’re admitted to the Rapid Assessment Zone (RAZ) waiting room.

“Before we would have only been able to see X number of patients, the number of beds we had was the number of patients we saw,” Cadigan says. “This way we can see double or triple the amount of people.”

As a result of their efforts, the total length of stay for CTAS level III patients has decreased as well as their wait time for physician assessment.

Another big improvement was the hospital’s left before being seen rate — when a patient goes through triage but tires of waiting in the emergency room and decides to leave before seeing a physician.

“We’ve always tracked those rates and we cut that rate by 50 per cent within the first six months — that was a significant improvement for us because there is a ton of risk associated with people leaving before they’re actually treated of seen by a doc,” Cadigan says, adding the number of patient complaints is also down since the RAZ has been opened.

For more information on RAZ, click here.