Guelph General Hospital is among many hospitals in the province dealing with more patients and longer wait times in the emergency room.
And a shortage of beds continue to be a big part of what is slowing things down.
GGH said over the last 30 days, a patient waited about five hours to see a physician, up from the 3.7 hours during the same period of time last year.
And for those who need to be admitted, the wait has been cut down, but it’s nowhere near where the hospital wants to be.
“In the last seven days, patients who came to the hospital and needed to be admitted waited over 24 hours for that bed,” said Melissa Skinner, the vice-president of patient services at GGH.
For reference, the number was between 41.1 and 50 hours last winter.
“People who are waiting for an inpatient bed have to wait in the emergency department,” Skinner said. “And when you only have 24 surfaces (stretchers) in your emergency department, if you have 15 people waiting for a bed, that doesn’t leave a lot of other spaces to see the patients who are waiting to just get regular emergency care.”
She said too often, there are people who have heart attacks or a stroke, and are afraid of heading to the ER because of the wait.
But she said those patients need not worry about waiting as long as others to be seen.
“A lot of the data that you see isn’t our most critical patients,” Skinner said. “They’re not our patients who come in (and) have life-threatening conditions, who had heart attacks. They actually move through the system very quickly.”
For others moving through the system, a patient volume increase during the viral season hasn't helped matters.
Skinner provided a snapshot from Dec. 18 to 23, where the hospital saw over 180 patients a day.
“This is about 13 per cent higher (year-over-year),” she said.
“During this period we also saw an increase in the number of patients who were critically unwell, with 15 per cent of patients coming to the emergency department needing to be admitted.”
The latest data from Health Quality Ontario, released in November, shows patients spent over 22 hours waiting for a bed in Ontario hospitals on average.
Just 23 per cent of patients admitted got into a bed within the eight hour target set out by the province.
Skinner said eight hours is a very aspirational target, but a good one to have for hospitals to aim toward.
She said hospitals started working on viral season strategies last year, including opening up more beds, finding more space and working on ways to work with patients to avoid admission.
Money was also invested into a patient flow team, which has led to some success compared to last year.
But Skinner acknowledges there is still more progress to be made.
“We’re not where we want to be, we’re pretty competitive in Guelph,” she said. “We still want to do better but we’re very proud of the planning that we did, and the support that we got to move ahead with a lot of our strategies.”
