Prince George, B.C. - The University Hospital of Northern B.C. will start working with staff and physicians to see how best to use new emergency room funding from the Provincial Government.

Earlier today, the Minister of Health, Kevin Falcon, announced UHNBC would be getting $261 thousand dollars to ease congestion in the ER and reduce patient wait times.

Chief Operating Officer, Michael McMillan says the UHNBC emergency room typically sees 50 thousand patients a year. The wait times referenced by the Minister of Health, have to do with the time it takes to have a person admitted to a bed once a decision to admit the patient to hospital has been made. The hospital wants to reach a mark where 80% of patients are admitted to a bed within 10 hrs. “We are not achieving that benchmark yet, so it’s important with receiving this funding that we move that benchmark forward. We’ve got work to do around increasing that flow.”   Right now  about 60% are hitting that mark.

McMillan says there are already some preliminary thoughts on using the dollars for critical care “Which ties in with work we are already doing, so at this point, the most we can say is that we are extremely pleased to receive the additional funding, its always nice to get some money to help address the issues.”

There are several facets to the problem. McMillan says there is the flow into Emergency because people don’t have a family physician, the flow from Emergency to other departments, the flow of patients from hospital beds to other support programs outside the hospital. “People are working on all of those issues, and I feel like we’re making progress, but there’s lots more work to be done.”

He says he had talks with emergency staff just yesterday   about the challenges “I recognize this is a big issue for us, the timing of this funding announcement is very fortunate for us in terms of moving some of that work forward, but regardless of whether the funding came or not, we actually have to do this work because it is the right thing to do.”