Patients at Lakeridge Health‘s emergency rooms, including Oshawa Hospital, are now getting care much faster after a remarkable turnaround. Over the past two years, wait times have been slashed: patients are seen by an emergency provider 48 percent faster, treated and discharged 30 percent faster, and ambulance offload times have improved by 81 percent, according to Lakeridge Health.
The Oshawa Hospital emergency department, once known for patients languishing in hallways and ambulance delays topping two hours, is now one of Ontario’s top performers. It ranks 8th in the East Region for how quickly a doctor first assesses patients, based on data from the provincial ranking.
Brian Pollard, Health System Executive, Clinical, at Lakeridge Health, described the state of the ERs in late 2023 as “a hot mess.” Back then, patients sometimes waited 73 hours for an inpatient bed, and social admissions were overloading the system. The change started with a $1.7 million program called Hospital2Home that gives temporary home care to patients while they wait for permanent support from Ontario Health at Home. That alone cut social admissions by nearly 75 percent.
The overhaul also freed up roughly 50,000 patient days by helping people go home sooner. The number of patients stuck in hospital waiting for long-term care or home supports – so-called Alternate Level of Care patients – dropped from almost 30 percent of all inpatients to under 12 percent. Daily morning meetings now bring together leaders from across the health system to fix problems in real time, replacing weekly reviews that were too slow to react.
New nurse practitioners specializing in elder care work in the emergency room to spot seniors at risk of quickly losing strength. With one-quarter of ER patients over 65, that focus has kept many from unnecessary admissions. Meanwhile, a hiring blitz and schedule changes eliminated a chronic reliance on agency nurses, filling all vacancies for the first time in years. “This success truly shows that it takes a village,” said Dr. Jaclyn Herman, Chief and Medical Director for Emergency Medicine at Lakeridge Health. “It was a collaborative effort with combined initiatives that delivered these results.” The result is an ER that residents can count on when seconds matter.
