Following early success, Windsor Regional Hospital will be expanding a pilot program aimed at improving patient flow and reducing emergency department pressures.
Approximately five weeks ago, the Met Campus introduced an expansion of their discharge bays, which is a designated space where patients can wait after being medically cleared to go home.
This expansion has already made a noticeable impact, saving more than 306 hours of idle bed time, and has helped transition approximately 245 patients out of inpatient beds more efficiently.
This expansion is treating discharge as a priority so the hospital can move the patients that are waiting in the emergency department to idle beds in order to improve emergency department wait times.
Initially, a small number of beds on inpatient units were designated as discharge bays, but starting on April 27, the hospital will launch a centralized discharge bay on the fifth floor with a dedicated team.
Kristi Cecile, Clinical Vice President at Windsor Regional Hospital, says a dedicated nurse will be within the centralized bay area.
"That nurse would be responsible for the discharge paperwork, some education, as well as some follow-up calls post-discharge the following day, ensuring that our patient satisfaction is maintained. So over the next six weeks to two months we will revisit the data and the satisfaction that our patients are seeing as well as our community and our staff."
Kuljeet Kalsi, Director of Access and Flow at Windsor Regional Hospital, says this will particularly help peak afternoon demands.
"So when a patient is medically ready to go home, but waiting for things like transportation, final paperwork, last dose of medications, they're able to go to this dedicated discharge area, which will be located on the fifth floor to start with, this will allow us to open up in-patient beds sooner for patients waiting in the emergency department."
Kalsi says over the five weeks there have been patients who approached frontline nurses expressing satisfaction.
"Some of the data that we've received with this five weeks of trial, it's about 70 to 80 minutes at this point. But accumulating, that's 306 hours that we have saved total. That means those 306 hours are given back to the emergency department to treat and bring in those patients from the waiting rooms or offload those Code 7's that are with EMS."
There are also plans to potentially expand the centralized model to the Ouellette Campus. Discharge bays are already in use there, though currently they are spread across units rather than in a centralized area.
Over the coming months, data on patient satisfaction, staff feedback, and overall system performance will be closely monitored.