Paramedics and hospital staff in Chatham-Kent are celebrating a remarkable achievement.
Ambulance off-load times at the emergency department (ED) in 2019 went down drastically from March to the end of the year. Donald MacLellan, General Manager of Chatham Kent EMS, told reporters on Monday that patient off-load times were cut nearly in half from 42 to 23 minutes in the last nine months of the year.
MacLellan said the lower off-load times mean paramedics can get back on the road quicker to better serve the community. He said the Chatham ED gets about 20 ambulances a day while the Wallaceburg site gets around five and that means local paramedics do less sitting around and waiting by an average of eight hours a day.
Chatham-Kent Hospital Alliance (CKHA) CEO Lori Marshall said a new off-load nurse introduced a year ago and dedicated to the task has made a big difference.
"We're very focused on changing the wait times in the emergency department and this is sort of our first step in that particular area," said Marshall.
Marshall said the emergency department has been identified as an area to improve, adding this is only the beginning.
"This is again another example within our community of how our organizations work so well together," she said.
MacLellan said hospital and EMS officials studied patient flow to better prioritize patients and make better use of emergency department beds. The CKHA spent 617 hours offloading in 2017 but that number exploded to 1,577 hours in 2018 and hospital officials knew they had to do something to reduce the patient off-load times.
Marshall said the ED in Chatham sees, on average, 105 patients a day.
