The top official at Chatham-Kent’s hospital says there’s still much work to be done to improve wait times for patients in the emergency department.
Chatham-Kent Health Alliance President and CEO Lori Marshall said on average, patients who attend the emergency departments at the hospital’s two sites wait an average of eight hours before they are admitted.
“Unfortunately, that takes a little bit longer than we would like,” she said. “It really is a major focus for us to really try to be one of the best in the province. We already are, I would say, in the top box performance in the province and yet we’re not satisfied with that. We really want to try to improve those times.”
Marshall said the hospital would like to see the average wait time reduced to five hours. However, she said it will take improvements in all hospital departments, from discharging patients to inputting electronic health records.
“I think that if there’s one thing that everybody in the public would always say is that it takes too long to wait in an emergency department,” she said. “We’ve got some work to do.”
