HEAD of the Accident and Emergency Department of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Dr. Cheynie Williams has given the assurance that in spite of a shortage of staff a concerted effort is being made to improve wait times and reduce bottle necks in that department.
She was speaking to the media on the sidelines of a seminar recently hosted by the Barbados National Registry where she noted improvements being seen are system wide not just the A&E.
“We try to decide if you genuinely have a need to access services in the A&E or if you can be better served at a polyclinic or a another facility, so we try to prevent the volume coming in and that is done by triaging. So the nurse will see you, assess you and determine how urgent you are. If you find that you have a twisted ankle or something that is not urgent that you can do home remedies for we would recommend that you go home, seek medical attention at your nearest polyclinic.”
However, she noted that as it relates to speed, at times there can be a bottleneck.
“We only have one nurse sometimes we would try to augment to two nurses depending on what human resources we have. If six people come at the same time, a triage takes ten minutes, six tens are 60 so the person who comes at number six will be seen an hour later.”
“We can’t speed it up to less than ten minutes with an individual. We don’t want to say you only have a chest pain and then you have a heart attack. An ECG has to be done, you have to check vitals, check your urine, so there are lots of things we do with the individuals. Yes there will be a queuing system, which shouldn’t happen....”she said, adding that this is also being addressed.
Dr. Williams conceded that there is a need for more staff. “ We have been short-staffed chronically. Mainly nursing and other support services, due mostly to the overcrowding situation we would have in the Emergency Department. Many times on a daily basis we would have large numbers of patients waiting to access the wards, they are obviously sick patients waiting to get care on the wards.”
“They are seen by their specialist services, so the internal medicine persons who sees them make the decision to admit them and initiate their treatment, but they still need nursing care. And we don’t get the augmentation of nursing in the numbers that we need to then allow us to see patients that come to genuinely access A& E care,” she said.
Section: