Scheduled visits help clog ERs, critics say

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This article was published 21/05/2015 (3262 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Physicians are scheduling an increasing number of patient appointments to Winnipeg hospital emergency rooms despite recommendations dating back a decade that the practice be eliminated.

According to figures obtained by the Manitoba Progressive Conservatives, there were 16,479 scheduled visits to city ERs last year — a substantial increase from the previous year.

A task force on emergency care, established in the wake of two serious incidents in city ERs in 2003 and 2004, urged scheduled emergency room visits be done away with “as soon as possible” to reduce workloads and patient wait times.

Patients attending Winnipeg emergency departments often face long waits for care, and paramedics often wait an hour or longer after reaching emergency departments before they can transfer patients to the authority of hospital staff.

The Winnipeg Regional Health Authority recently admitted it has been unable to make any progress on several ER performance targets set more than two years ago, including on patient wait times and the number of non-emergency patients attending hospital emergency rooms.

Part of the problem is physicians are scheduling patients to receive non-emergency services at hospital ERs.

“The NDP said they were going to eliminate it, and what we’ve seen instead are the numbers going in… (the) wrong direction,” Progressive Conservative health critic Myrna Driedger said after raising the issue in the legislature Thursday.

She said scheduling minor treatments in ERs is no way to run a hospital emergency room system.

“No wonder our ERs are in crisis,” Driedger said. “We seem to have a government that’s absolutely incompetent at fixing any part of it at all.”

Donald Lepp said his son Russell, 6, was kept waiting for five hours Wednesday for a scheduled treatment at Children’s Hospital.

The family was initially told Russell, who had a heart transplant in 2008, would be going in for an IV treatment after having been exposed to chicken pox at school. Due to the transplant, he has a suppressed immune system. However, the family later learned there had been a mix-up, and Russell only needed an injection.

Lepp said since his son wasn’t sick, he got put to the back of the line.

‘It really highlights the problem that not only is this not a good practice — to have non-urgent cases in your ER — it causes problems all the way along’

— Donald Lepp, whose son, Russell, 6, was kept waiting for five hours in Children’s Hospital for a scheduled treatment

“It really highlights the problem that not only is this not a good practice — to have non-urgent cases in your ER — it causes problems all the way along,” he said.

Brad Hartle, a spokesman for Health Minister Sharon Blady, said while scheduled visits make up less than five per cent of total visits to city emergency rooms, the government acknowledges it is still too much.

“It would be irresponsible to simply eliminate all scheduled ER visits, as patients need to receive care in a place that is safe, equipped to help them and staffed with the right medical professionals,” Hartle said in an email.

To make sure those places exist, the government is adding doctors and nurses and partnering with regional health authorities to build more spaces for families to get the care they need, he said, including at QuickCare clinics and ACCESS centres.

Hartle added the Progressive Conservatives have yet to offer any positive ideas on how to improve emergency rooms.

larry.kusch@freepress.mb.ca