Do you need to go to Sault Area Hospital’s emergency department?
Do you want to know how long you’ll have to wait to see a doctor?
Sault Area Hospital (SAH) now has an ED (emergency department) wait clock on its website showing ED and Fast Track wait times.
ED represents SAH’s main emergency which treats chest pain, bleeding, broken bones and other serious issues while Fast Track represents minor emergencies such as cough, cold and fever.
Quietly launched October 11, the clock shows 24/7:
- real-time wait times to see a doctor in the ED and Fast Track
- the number of people currently registered and already waiting
- the number of people currently being treated
- information on high and low wait times over the previous 30 days.
SAH is one of only a few Ontario hospitals now posting this information for the public to view.
The ED wait clock comes along as a complement to an existing SAH website page which outlines what are considered emergency health problems and non-urgent health problems (more suitable for a community walk-in clinic or family doctor).
“We approached this from a soft launch using social media,” said Ron Gagnon, SAH president and CEO, speaking to the hospital’s board of directors at its regular monthly meeting Monday.
Gagnon told the board there have been 8,000 clicks on the SAH ED wait clock so far.
The board also discussed changes to SAH’s complaints and compliments response process.
In his monthly report to the board, Gagnon stated beginning November 1, all letters of reply will be reviewed by a member of SAH’s senior management team and ultimately signed by himself.
SooToday asked if there has been an increase in complaints to SAH over ED wait times or other issues.
Not at all, Gagnon said.
“One of the things we do on the senior management team is we read patient letters at the beginning of every meeting, the good and bad…and we want to elevate our response as an organization.”
“Our patient relation group already does a fantastic job and we want to augment that from a senior management capacity,” Gagnon said.
“The change is being implemented in order to ensure our patients and families know that their letter is receiving attention at the highest level of the organization and to ensure the messages conveyed in our letters of reply are reflective of our continuous improvement approach,” Gagnon wrote in his report to the board.
“It’s time to move it (compliments and complaints from patients) to the next level…it stops with me,” Gagnon said to board members Monday.
In other news from Monday’s SAH board of directors meeting:
Directors approved a policy outlining three definitive skill sets SAH will be looking for in future appointees to the board.
Future appointees to the SAH board of directors must be experienced in property management, project management in health information system implementation and continuous improvement with knowledge of Lean.
Lean is a management philosophy which aims to create more value for customers (or patients in SAH’s case) with fewer resources.
SAH board directors may serve a maximum of three three-year terms.
Greg Peres, SAH board of directors chair, told SooToday he does not anticipate any new appointments to the board before 2018.
