The emergencies of Belgian hospitals are under pressure. In part due to the dire shortage of capacity in the first line, patients are quicker to go to the emergencies, more often with non-acute pathology.
Physicians and co-workers of different emergencies recently attested to being continuously overrun by too big a number of patients. This situation not only creates a high workload, but also brings a quality risk. An overcrowded emergency room needs more time to help patients that actually do have a highly urgent and critical pathology.
Unfortunately, head nurses, department heads or policy workers have little to no grip on environmental factors outside of their service. Also, you do not wish (and cannot) deny patients from your service. But there are actions you can take. Our experience in optimising emergency room processes shows this.
An emergency service does not work on its own but is a link within a complex adaptive system of communicating vessels. This way, overcrowding can easily be dismissed as being caused by too high of an inflow, while internal inefficiencies or a suboptimal throughput ("Emergency department boarding") can also be a factor.
We find that experiences and visions are often contradicted between the emergency department, the wards and management. That is when our independence and objectivity are our great assets. Further, we combine quantitative methods (MZG, eCARE, AmbuREG, HIS, Ureg, etc.) with a broad qualitative analysis by doing walkthroughs and interviews. This allows us to map all nuances behind the numbers.
Hict performs impact-effort analyses in collaboration with the project team at the client, sets up a priority list of improvement projects. These are "quick wins" as well as larger strategich projects.
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