with officials london health science center (LHSC) are reassuring patients that despite the long wait time All the patients coming for treatment will be looked after in the Emergency Departments (EDs) of the city.
The remarks come as many hospitals across the province, and across Canada, report long and increasing emergency departments’ wait times.
Patients spent an average of 2.1 hours in Ontario’s emergency departments for the first evaluation in May, according to Recent Provincial Statisticsand spent an average of 20.1 hours in emergencies before being admitted to the hospital.
In London, patients waited an average of three hours at University Hospital and 2.5 hours at Victoria Hospital for the first evaluation, and an average of 18.5 and 15.1 hours, respectively, in the ED before hospitalization.
“Certainly our emergency wait times are increasing and have increased during the pandemic. We are seeing all patients who appear before the ED, but our wait times have been increasing throughout the summer,” said Dr Christy MacDonald, head of the city and chairman of the Western Division at LHSC’s Department of Emergency Medicine.
“If you’re here for a stroke or if you’re here for chest pain, your wait time will certainly be much shorter… knee pain, but just knee pain. You can wait longer, which It could happen in hours.”
London’s first-assessment wait times are higher than the provincial average and the highest in the immediate London area, but still below about a dozen other hospitals. The Metropolitan Campus of Windsor Hospital saw the longest average first-assessment wait time in May at 5.1 hours.
The city’s ED-to-hospital admission time is lower than the provincial average, and shorter than the time recorded at nearly 50 other Ontario hospitals. In May, West Lincoln Memorial Hospital in Hamilton recorded an average admission wait time of 51.7 hours, the longest the province saw that month.
Increasing wait times across the province are being blamed for, among other things, high patient volumes, COVID-19 hospital outbreaks, surgical backlogs, and staffing challenges due to COVID absenteeism, and retiring burn health care workers. go or leave the profession.
“In the emergency department, we are on the front line from day one. Our employees are tired. they work hard. They are an amazing team, but we are all tired,” McDonald said.
“I think people are re-evaluating what their needs are in life and where they want to spend their time working. We are seeing this all over the country,” she continued. We continue to retain our employees and really come together as a team, but yeah, everyone is definitely tired.”
In addition, McDonald’s attributes higher wait times to more complex medical issues seen in patients who may have delayed receiving therapy during the pandemic.
“Patients coming to (emergency departments) are far more complex…their medical issues are far more complicated. Instead of just having chest pain because of the heart (issues), you can be a transplant patient who is going through the special treatment that comes with the chest pain,” Macdonald said.
Another factor was the ability or inability to provide care during summer vacations and summer vacations, he said.
“The affected patients do not have family doctors or are not able to see family doctors for whatever reason, patients will come in emergency, which is justified. We are here to provide care.”
Staff shortages led to temporary emergency department closures in small Ontario areas earlier this month, including Clinton, Listowel, Seaforth, St. Mary’s and Wingham.
Elsewhere in Ontario, the hospital organization of Kingston announced over the weekend that it would limit the number of patients visiting its Hotel DU Hospital to 120 per day due to staff shortages.
Emergency department staffing challenges and closures are also being seen in hospitals in other provinces,
Macdonald said the London-area closure had not yet resulted in a significant increase in the patient population of the LHSC. “Whether it will happen, I really don’t know.”
“Ideally everyone (ED) would be open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, but those are not the times we find ourselves in.”
In a later statement, an LHSC spokesperson said that “at this time” there were no formal plans to reduce service within the organization.
“However, if a clinical area (health human resources) is facing bottlenecks, it may result in a temporary reduction in services until staffing stabilizes. To mitigate this issue and prevent service disruptions, All avenues are being explored for this. This is our top priority,” the statement read.
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