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This article was published 28/2/2015 (2031 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Two years after vowing to improve the efficiency of hospital emergency departments by 2015, the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority admits it has failed to make real progress in any of five targeted categories.

In fact, in some areas, the situation has worsened.

Patients in emergency departments are waiting too long to be treated and discharged, and they're waiting too long for beds if they need to be admitted. Ambulances continue to routinely wait for more than an hour to unload patients at ERs. And far too many patients with non-emergency health issues are clogging emergency rooms despite efforts to divert them to Quick Care clinics and other alternatives.

"It's disappointing," Lori Lamont, the WRHA's vice-president for inter-professional practice and chief nursing officer, said Friday of the 2014 results.

Two years ago, in a speech to the Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce, Arlene Wilgosh, the health region's president and CEO, set five performance targets for the conclusion of this year that, if achieved, would slash patient wait times (see box).

But with a year left to go, it appears none of the targets will be met.

Lamont, pinch-hitting for Wilgosh, who was unavailable Friday, said health officials "underestimated" how complicated it would be to find solutions that would yield concrete results. This despite being aware from the onset that to fix ER waits they would have to look at overall hospital efficiencies and even how hospital workloads are influenced by outside factors such as home care and personal-care-home waits.

"It's a big system and it's complicated. There's many moving parts," Lamont said, while emphasizing that the health authority is more determined than ever to improve city ER waits, which are among the longest in the country.

"People are quite committed to making this work because we want to provide good care to people," she said.

The introduction of Quick Care clinics in Winnipeg was designed to lessen the load on emergency departments by siphoning off patients with less urgent health problems. Lamont said the clinics -- there are now three in the city with more in the works -- likely prevented the situation from becoming worse, but more needs to be done to promote them. That includes triage nurses in hospital emergency departments suggesting to certain patients a visit to a Quick Care clinic may save them an excruciatingly long wait.

The system is also trying to improve patient flow by having emergency departments initiate certain tests before a patient is seen by a doctor and by having specialists make more timely visits to ERs. Lamont said more also needs to be done to ensure staff in other parts of the hospital understand how efficiencies in their area can benefit the emergency room.

'It's a big system and it's complicated. There's many moving parts' ‐ WRHA's Lori Lamont

More and more, the health system is looking at more 24/7 care, as opposed to one in which many services are only provided from Monday to Friday. That includes arranging for home care for a patient on a weekend to free up a hospital bed instead of waiting until Monday to do so, Lamont said.

Several pilot projects have been launched to improve efficiency, including a new six-bed unit at Health Sciences Centre that is dealing exclusively with patients where more than 24 hours is needed to assess whether they should be admitted to hospital. That is freeing up ER treatment beds.

Meanwhile, new initiatives at Grace Hospital have seen the facility improve the number of ER patients receiving care within four hours by 20 per cent in the past year, Lamont said.

Health Minister Sharon Blady was unavailable for comment on Friday.

Progressive Conservative MLA Cameron Friesen (Morden-Winkler) said the failure to improve ER waits in Winnipeg reflects badly on the Selinger government, which has greatly increased health spending without getting any results.

"What these numbers show clearly is that there is a lack of improvement, and in some (cases), the situations actually worsening," he said.

Some of the targets set two years ago -- particularly the one calling for all ambulances to be unloaded at hospital within 60 minutes -- weren't aggressive enough to begin with, Friesen said.

larry.kusch@freepress.mb.ca