Orillia Soldiers’ Memorial Hospital ER ranked 4th in Ontario

Orillia Packet & Times

Finding efficiencies throughout Orillia Soldiers’ Memorial Hospital (OSMH) is paying off.

The Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care has ranked Orillia’s emergency department fourth best out of 74 Ontario hospitals.

“We’re very proud,” said Bernadette DeMunnik, manager of the OSMH emergency department. “The staff in this organization work incredibly hard to provide good quality patient care and to do it within the resources that we have.”

The ranking, measuring 2013 performance results, comes with a $1.9-million injection to the hospital’s 2014 budget. In 2013, the hospital earned $1.7 million for ranking ninth in the 2012 results.

“It comes in to help you continue to make process improvement and to continue to do well,” DeMunnik said.

In 2013, the hospital used some of that funding to pay for extra physician hours in the emergency department during business hours, she said.

“The funding allows you to focus on processes and then get staff involved because staff know how better to do the work,” DeMunnik said.

The hospital has also revamped some supply rooms, so they are better organized.

“Staff can find things and it’s more predictable. (It) saves waste of motion,” DeMunnik said. “We looked at things that save any of the waste in the system: wasted time, waste of intelligence, anything like that.”

The provincial rankings measure hospital emergency departments on five performance indicators: length of stay in the emergency department for patients requiring admission into the hospital, including: patients with minor conditions who don’t require admission and patients with complex conditions who don’t require admission; time to physician initial assessment (how soon a patient sees a physician from the time he or she register in the emergency department); and time to inpatient bed (the length of time patients remain in the emergency department once it’s been determined they require admission into the hospital).The rankings include emergency departments with more than 30,000 visit volume, though last year, a few hospitals in the program had fewer than 30,000, DeMunnik said.

OSMH sees between 53,000 and 54,000 emergency room visits annually.

Hospital staff are still discussing how to use the 2014 funds. The plan must be approved by the North Simcoe Muskoka Local Health Integration Network and the ministry.

“Some of the money will be used to open additional beds during (surgery) time so that we can still put our patients where the best place for them is,” DeMunnik said.

She said the entire hospital deserves credit for the fourth-place ranking.

“It’s not just what happens in (emergency). If we don’t have inpatient beds to move the admits to, then we can’t get the patients out of the waiting room onto the stretchers to be seen,” she said.

In the fall of 2009, the hospital began a process improvement led by DeMunnik.

The group focused on streamlining while maintaining quality care, she said.

“One small example was, in the emergency department when a patient went for a CT scan or an ultrasound and the radiologist needed to read the report, it took a long time to get the report back. A long time being hours,” DeMunnik said.

Staff would then keep checking their computer system every half- hour to see if the report was finished.

An electronic link was set up and now a green light icon informs staff when reports are complete.

DeMunnik said every department has seen changes.

“Every department has been touched by it and that’s why it’s really nice to see the reward for the organization coming back in the form of money,” she said.