Published: August 07, 2008 11:06 pm            

Local emergency rooms fare well

Hospitals are working to improve

Patients waiting for treatment at Kokomo’s two emergency rooms spend 33 percent less time before seeing a doctor than the national average.

The average waiting time of an emergency room patient at Howard Regional Health System and St. Joseph Hospital was 37 minutes, and both facilities are striving for ways to reduce that time.

Carla Meyer, executive director of nursing at Howard Regional, said the average time from the moment a patient enters the emergency room to the time he or she sees a doctor is 37.2 minutes.

“That is staying pretty steady,” Meyer said. “There have been no huge spikes up or down.”

Meyer said the time to see a doctor is dependent on the patient population at any given moment. She said the volume of patients in the emergency room is increasing.

Howard Regional recently opened a new emergency room area that includes an administration holding area because the hospital didn’t want the waiting time to rise as the patient volume increased, she said.

“We’re looking for the waiting time numbers to decrease,” Meyer said. “We have implemented a fast track between noon and midnight so that more critical patients can see a doctor in a shorter period of time.”

Monette Allen, manager of Critical Care Services at St. Joseph Hospital, said the hospital tracks the time it takes for a patient to see a doctor in the emergency room.

“We work on this monthly,” she said. “We track from the moment a patient walks in the door until the time they see a physician.”

Allen said the time has been reduced from approximately 40 minutes to 37 minutes since the first of the year.

“We don’t believe 37 minutes is good enough,” she said. “We’re not comfortable with the fact that we’re better than the national average.”

Allen said the number of patients being seen in the emergency room increased by 10 percent from 2006 through 2007.

“The number of visits has gone up,” she said. “We should surpass those numbers again this year.”

Ken de la Bastide can be reached at (765) 454-8580 or via e-mail at ken.delabastide@kokomotribune.com

        

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