The Manitoba government has partnered with front-line health-care staff to form a Lower Wait Time and System Improvement Team.

The goal is to develop a strategy to reduce patient wait times in the emergency room.

The Lower Wait Time and System Improvement Team is led by Dr. Paul Ratana, provincial specialty lead of emergency medicine at Health Sciences Centre (HSC), and Dr. Kendiss Olafson, internal medicine and critical care at HSC Winnipeg, with physicians, nurses and allied health professionals specializing in emergency medicine, internal medicine, neurology, family medicine, anesthesiology and more.

The team is supported by experienced process engineers who specialize in streamlining systems to improve services.

“No one understands the delays in patient care better than those on the front lines of health care,” Olafson said.

“They face the daily frustration of a system that is often slow, fragmented and siloed. Our goal is to address some of the most challenging and discouraging aspects of care delivery, supporting the quality of front-line work without adding to workloads.”

The Manitoba government has released a Lower Wait Time Strategy, developed by the team, to improve timely patient access to high-quality emergency health care across the province.

The strategy outlines how to increase or add services that affect the timeliness of care at three main points of a patient’s experience – triage and admission if necessary, inpatient care and access to outpatient treatment to be able to return home safely.

Strategic initiatives include increasing the number of endoscopy procedures, including over the weekend, exploring models to shorten the wait time between triage and initial physician assessments, and expanding the community intravenous program to allow more patients to recover at home.