We were treated last week to an inside look at the reconfigured emergency room at the Royal Jubilee Hospital.
Faced with too many patients and not enough space, staff turned a creative eye to the challenge, and Vancouver Island’s largest tertiary care centre doubled the space available for treatment by re-imagining the existing space.
Consider the numbers: The ER sees 160 to 200 patients a day, representing a 20 per cent increase in patient volumes over the last three years.
Now, while the old ER was designed to process about 40,000 patients per year, the new space can accommodate up to 60,000 patients.
Staff and patients both benefit from the re-thought spaces.
Besides being the primary emergency care site for Victoria, Oak Bay and a large part of Saanich, the Royal Jubilee is also the referral centre for psychiatry, nephrology, cardiac services, vascular surgery and oncology and serves many at-risk individuals who are homeless and struggling with addictions.
It’s a busy place.
“We found ourselves in a position where the department was bursting at the seams and not functioning well with respect to patient care, safety, privacy and respect for patients,” noted Dr. Chris Morrow, Site Chief, Emergency and Trauma for the Island. “We all knew we had difficulty finding space for acute care stretchers but also for providing the care for the large volume of ambulatory patients that were coming in.”
The grassroots solution welcomed input from all staff – the people most familiar with the needs and the space – to rethink an existing floorplan and with a relatively modest $220,000 budget, reclaimed an internal waiting room, made it into acute care beds and used a larger outer waiting room to create a more patient-friendly environment.
The result is improved work flow, enhanced safety and in general, a better experience for both patients and staff.
A creative approach yielded concrete results.