Wait times drop at St. Michael ER, data shows

SILVERDALE – Data provided to the Kitsap Sun shows marked improvement in the time it takes both for patients to be transferred from ambulances into the emergency department at St. Michael Medical Center and to be seen by providers inside the Silverdale hospital in recent months, even as the number of patients arriving at the facility for treatment has ticked up over the last year.

The Poulsbo Fire Department began tracking drop-off wait times for ambulances in July last year after they began to stretch out and ambulances began to stack up at the hospital. Data provided by the department showed the average wait time for ambulances reached a monthly peak over the last year in December at 18.9 minutes. That number has since dropped to 10.6 minutes, as of July 2023.

In July 2022, 1.6% of hospital transports waited more than two hours to hand over patients to the facility, a peak over the last year, and the wait time for 90% of fire department ALS (Advanced Life Support) transports, those for patients with more acute conditions, was about 50 minutes, also a peak. As of July this year, those numbers sat at 0.1% and 20 minutes, respectively. About 6% of transports in July this year waited more than 30 minutes, down from 16.5% in December last year.

Meanwhile, the number of daily hospital transports has grown over the last year, from an average of 31.9 in July 2022 up to 46 in May 2023. Figures from the hospital show that the emergency department was averaging 165 patients per day in July last year, a number that has climbed to more than 200 per day last month.

Inside the facility, hospital officials point to improvement in a weekly median arrival-to-triage figure, which has dropped from 15 minutes in December 2022 to two minutes or less as of June 2023.

With boosted staffing levels and some procedural