Kids’ hospital scrambles to reduce waits

The Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario is redeploying staff, adding specialized positions and looking at online tools for families in response to “unprecedented” pressures and long wait times for care as similar trends are seen at children’s hospitals across the province.

The Ottawa-based hospital’s medical units are currently at 124-percent occupancy after a stretch of its busiest-ever months, it said in a news release. Staff shortages and surges in patients needing mental health, respiratory and critical care have led to cancelled surgeries and delayed procedures.

On Friday, CHEO detailed steps it’s taking to ensure safe care for patients, including moving more medical professionals to front-line roles, adding shifts and embedding specialists with clinical care teams to ensure people are discharged sooner.

“There is no silver bullet, there is no one solution,” hospital president Alex Munter said in a phone interview Friday.

“It’s a complex problem, but really, we’re throwing everything we’ve got at it.”

Some of the changes are set to take place this weekend, Munter said, with medical professionals trained in critical care set to return to the intensive care unit, and staff from other departments set to be redeployed.

Next week, the hospital plans to place “discharge planners” in clinical teams to ensure children in inpatient beds get home sooner — a bottleneck that Munter said has contributed to emergency department waits because there are no available beds for new patients to be admitted to.