South Health Campus eases bottlenecks
Emergency department opened year ago
Nearly a year after Calgary’s newest emergency department opened at South Health Campus, the ward has provided some breathing room at the city’s other overburdened facilities, particularly during the hectic cold and flu season, health officials say.
About 160 patients a day are being seen in the ER at the mega-hospital in the city’s deep south, and the facility is on track for about 60,000 visits in its first year.
Typically during this time of year, when patient volumes tend to rise by up to 10 per cent, the city’s hospitals would be operating at close to 100 per cent capacity daily, but the bottlenecks haven’t been as severe so far this year, said Lori Anderson, South Health Campus vice-president and Alberta Health Services interim senior vice-president for the Calgary zone.
“With the opening of South Health Campus and the emerg, we’ve been able to handle the same increased patient volumes without the same capacity challenges,” Anderson said.
“(It’s) making a difference to the patients and their families who are seeking care there and also making a difference within the whole Calgary zone.”
The health campus, which has opened in stages, is nearly fully operational, with 256 out of 269 beds in use and the rest set to come online early in the new year.
The emergency department, which has 30 beds, opened in January 2013.
It’s been touted as a key piece of medical infrastructure to help the city’s hospital waits ease back from a crisis that intensified in the early 2000s, then erupted in 2010 amid dire warnings of catastrophe.
Emergency physician Dr. Joe Vipond said the new hospital hasn’t provided all the answers but it has helped the system stay afloat.
“Overall, my sense is we’re holding our own. Things aren’t getting much worse, things aren’t getting much better. There was a sense four or five years ago we were at a crisis — ‘How can this get any worse? People are dying out there.’ I don’t have that sense right now,” said Vipond, who divides his shifts mainly between the Peter Lougheed Centre and Foothills Medical Centre.
“They’re seeing 150 people a day there (at South Health Campus). I can’t imagine what it would be like if those 150 people were distributed among the remainder of the other places.”
The hospital opening has been felt throughout the system in different ways, he added.
For example, while the busy Rockyview General Hospital in the city’s southwest might feel extra relief with the new facility opened in Calgary’s south, other ERs, such as the smaller Peter Lougheed, haven’t had the same relief valve effect, said Vipond.
Wildrose MLA Heather Forsyth, whose Calgary-Fish Creek ward is in the city’s south, called South Health Campus “a welcome blessing,” for people who need care.
Wait times remain too long, however, overall in Calgary, she added.
“We know there are bottlenecks in the system.”
According to AHS data, all the city’s hospitals continue to struggle to meet emergency department wait time benchmarks, including South Health Campus, with about 50 per cent of patients being seen and admitted within eight hours.
However, the health authority said patients are staying an average of 8.5 hours in the ER at the new facility before being admitted to a hospital bed.
The new hospital faces some of the same space problems as elsewhere in the system as the city deals with growth, Anderson said.
“If we didn’t have that additional capacity, the other sites would be experiencing even greater capacity challenges ... You look at the 160 and 180 patients that are seen in the emergency department every day, those would have to be seen at the other sites,” said Anderson.
“It just would be increased pressure.”
Anderson said AHS is putting in place a range of strategies to deal with growing patient volumes and the capacity crunch, pointing to hundreds of new continuing-care spaces set to open in Calgary next year.
“We function as a system. If you put capacity pretty much anywhere within the system, it helps.”
For Vipond, the new hospital was long overdue and the city still has catch-up work to complete to help improve the way the medical system operates.
“I think if we didn’t have South Health (Campus) right now, we’d be in a mess. It’s just impossible to imagine a city of this size with three (adult) emergency rooms. A fourth was sorely needed.”