Patient flow at Windsor Regional Hospital is heading in the right direction thanks to the hospital's new command centre.
Local media, along with the hospital board, recently toured the centre.
Chief Nursing Executive Karen McCullough says the command centre was launched in October and is described as a central hub for communication, escalation and operational decision-making involving discharge and flow of patients.
She says a nurse and an admitting clerk are on hand at all times.
"The command centre is really the hub, it's like the air traffic controller if you will," says McCullough. "If you look think of an airport, somebody's managing all the planes that are coming in and all of the planes that are going out, that's what the command centre does. It's really the air traffic controller of patients."
McCullough says the command centre has helped improve the transfer of a patient from the emergency department to a bed at both campuses.
"Before we started to do this work it took 11 hours to get a patient to a bed," says McCullough. "Now with the command centre, with the nurses, the admitting clerks all working together in the command centre we cut that down to an average of two and a half hours at Met and three and a half hours at the Ouellette campus is nine weeks."
Boards & screens are set up at Windsor Regional Hospital Met Campus' Command Centre (Photo by AM800's Rob Hindi)
She says the command centre will shift to completely digital later this year.
"Every patient that's coming into our hospital through the ED, through the surgical program we now know in the command centre who are they, where are they and we can really track in real time what bed do they need to be into and how do we get them there."
Huddles happen at the command centre twice a day with hospital directors and executives.
There are centres at both campuses which are staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
.@WRHospital staff members going over a number of items for both the Met & Ouellette sites at the Command Centre. #cklw pic.twitter.com/BecOxng5BK
— Rob Hindi (@rhindi800) January 11, 2018