At North York General Hospital we strive to achieve excellence.
Excellence in our business which is to take care of patients.
Excellence has a number of realms and what we hear from our patients
very regularly is that they want us to
provide the best possible care, the best possible outcomes,
they want us to have a safe environment for them.
They also want to have access to care. They want to be able to
be seen in a timely fashion. Access to care
is something that's going to have to be a hospital-wide strategy.
We consistently hear from our patients that
access to care is one of the key indicators of their patient experience.
Patients coming to the Emergency Department usually are coming in
in a fairly acute state and really need to access care as soon as possible.
Waiting in the Emergency Departments can be very difficult. It's loud, it's noisy
we don't have all of the resources and
physical facilities to treat patients. So the sooner we can get them to an
inpatient bed
the better it is for their care and treatment and their patient experience.
The type of care that they would receive from our floor
as opposed to an Emergency Department, we would be more available for them.
We would be able to carry out all the orders, cause a lot of patients coming up
there's a lot of orders that have not been done and they've been ordered since
that morning,
and they come up to us in the afternoon and we're playing catch up. And we know that
if they didn't do it
obviously there was no time for them to do it.
I think it's important to constantly give them information regarding their care process.
I think that alleviates some of the stress that goes along with the
patient.
Information is vital because if they're informed, the anxiety goes down
and they know that they're being thought of they're not being sort of forgot
about.
And always updating them, we're very busy but maybe a couple more hours before the
medical specialists on call can see you because they're covering the entire
hospital.
We've seen the volume of patients actually increase.
There's been a tremendous growth in North York as well as in surrounding
areas.
The demography is changing, patients are aging more
as well. We have no control over how many people come in though our front door.
We see everybody. We have to see everybody. So
it's a team approach
that starts with the emergency nurses, the emergency physicians,
diagnostic imaging, our consulting services,
ancillary services. Everybody works together
to make the patient experience whole and to try to improve
the turnaround times for patients into the system and out of the system.
We know that patients that wait for long periods of time in the Emergency Department,
their outcomes are different. They're not as good. That's not even to mention all the
other issues that go on like
privacy and
comfort. We really need to think about that
when we're dealing with our patients. So what can we do to help the
flow of that patient
through the system, through their journey, their healthcare journey in the best way
that we can.
I think there probably are some process issues that we also can tackle:
transitions to diagnostic imaging,
to different areas the hospital, endoscopy for example,
portering. We need to tackle all these different areas where
we might be able to impact on length of stay in Emergency Department, access to
beds on the floor
and of course that exit out of the hospital it's one of the things
that we've been working on for a long time - that ALC patient and how do we get
them out.
One of the things that we really want to try
and accomplish in our pursuit of excellence at
North York General Hospital is to really see all of the care that we provide, all
the services that we provide, through the eyes of the patients.
That's after all who we serve.
We are here to serve patients. So we really need to design our processes,
our spaces and all of our care through the eyes of the patients.
Access to care is a huge opportunity
to improve the patient experience because patients don't want to be
waiting
in halls on stretchers any longer than they absolutely have to.
So tackling unnecessary waits.
optimizing flow is all about improving the patient experience.
The patient that's in front of you is the imperative
but what about the one that's sitting in the Emergency Department
waiting to have care? We need to get into the endoscopy suite, we need to get into an
ICU bed.
I think sometimes you don't sort of think about that patient and yet
we're
as obligated to look after them as we are
to look after the one that's sitting in front of us. So I think it's
keeping that
whole perspective. And I think some people don't actually
think that they impact on these things. That
they don't have a role in making some of these things happen. And I
can't think of very many people in this hospital that don't have an important
role to play.
And maybe it's cleaning the room or maybe it's delivering the meal or maybe
it's giving that chest physio that that patient so
desperately needs to get out a hospital but
everyone in this hospital has a really really important role in making sure
that we can do this and that it can happen in that
in the long run it's actually better care for our patients