No one ever wants to go to an Emergency Room.
When facing a serious illness or injury, it’s where you need to go. However in recent years the Emergency Department (ED) at Mather Hospital was confronting a growing set of problems. The influx of walk-in urgent care centers in the community meant that the patients coming to Mather are sicker and dealing with more complex medical issues. The volume of behavioral health patients increased 130% in just three years. Add in the opioid epidemic, and Mather’s ED, like so many across the country, became overwhelmed. Service times slowed, throughput suffered and patient satisfaction decreased significantly.
The staff knew that it had to diagnose and treat the issues impacting the ED. Through collaborative problem solving with multiple departments, the ED staff pioneered solutions. They implemented innovative staffing plans to best meet patient needs. They streamlined the patient admission process to get patients to their rooms quicker.
As a result, door to triage time has been cut in half, as has door to ED bed placement. The time it takes for a patient to see a physician after they have been placed in an ED bed is seven minutes, well below the national benchmark of 15 minutes. For the entire second quarter of 2018, Mather’s ED patient satisfaction scores were above the 90th percentile and reaching 98th percentile in June.