Wait times report shows mixed results

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This article was published 26/01/2019 (1916 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A comprehensive report on wait times and bed occupancies presented to Southern Health’s board of directors this week shows the health authority is hitting some targets and missing others, as it grapples with geographic and demographic challenges and the province’s restructuring of health care delivery.

Ales Morga, regional director of planning and evaluation, presented the data Tuesday in La Broquerie.

Average bed occupancy rates in the health authority’s three regional facilities, which include Steinbach’s Bethesda Hospital, are hovering close to the national goal of 85 percent.

In transitional care centres, Emerson and Vita continue to see higher occupancy rates than St Pierre and Ste Anne.

A patient’s average length of stay in regional facilities has risen from 8.6 to 9.1 days, two days longer than the RHA’s target. Average stay lengths at Bethesda, however, have declined slightly over the past three fiscal years.

In smaller non-regional centres, the average length of stay has fallen from 20 to 17 days, but remains well above the RHA’s seven-day target. Vita continues to have the longest average stay length, at 55 days.

In facilities large and small, patients awaiting placement elsewhere skew the numbers higher, board members were told. When those cases are excluded, the RHA is nearer its target of six to nine days.

In response, the RHA plans to do more discharge planning when a patient is first admitted, and ask doctors to discharge outgoing patients earlier in the day.

To reduce emergency room bottlenecks, the board agreed patients need to flow efficiently to the appropriate secondary department. Administrators also noted the importance of primary care and home care supports, which can further reduce ER visits.

CEO Jane Curtis said ER wait times continue to be a key indicator used by provincial health officials to study the effectiveness of ongoing health care reforms.

Demand for orthopedic surgeries continues to be high, due to an aging population, Curtis said. While Southern Health continues to perform a high number of orthopedic surgeries, increasing demand over the past year has lengthened backlogs for the most common procedures.

Cataract removal waits jumped from 17 to 22 weeks, six weeks longer than the national average.

The queue for a hip replacement doubled, from 20 to 42 weeks, while the wait for a knee replacement quadrupled, from 15 weeks to 61 weeks. Joint surgery waitlists in the region are now far above the national average, but the RHA was approved to perform 100 more over the next year.

Waits for diagnostic services, which fall under new eight-week provincial targets, also rose. CT scans can still be had in two weeks, but the wait for an MRI scan stretched to 13 weeks from 10. Ultrasound delays doubled, and now stand at 4.7 weeks.

On the rehabilitative front, wait times for occupational therapy have fallen slightly to 15 weeks, while outpatient physiotherapy waits continue to hover at 18 weeks.

The wait to see a speech-language pathologist has dropped to 25 weeks from 36, but audiology appointments now arrive in 21 weeks, six weeks longer than in 2017.

On the mental health side, the time elapsed between referral and assessment, and assessment and treatment, are both below the province’s new eight-week benchmarks.

Across the region, 83.8 percent of those surveyed said they had a family doctor in 2016, a figure nearly identical to provincial and national targets. Administrators noted one third of those who reported they didn’t have a regular doctor said their provider left or retired.

Regarding human resources, Southern Health continues to search for more Francophone employees. Currently, just over half of its designated bilingual positions are filled by a speaker of both official languages. Curtis said the health authority is “constantly working on getting this number up.”