REGINA – There has been drastic change to Saskatchewan healthcare and how it operates in the past few years. Thursday, Regina Qu’Appelle Health Region (RQHR) provided an update on an innovative, first-in-Canada pilot project.
Officials believe the project’s success could lead to bigger changes in hospitals across Saskatchewan.
READ MORE: Visiting hour restrictions removed at Sask. health care facilities
In February, unit 4A at Pasqua Hospital was reorganized into an accountable care unit (ACU).
The ACU philosophy was developed by a physician in the United States and has been implemented in hospitals in the US, UK and Australia but never Canada.
The goal is to turn sprawling hospitals into smaller, more manageable units through four specific features:
– A physician and nurse manager share leadership of a ward.
– A physician is responsible for one unit, rather than being spread across the entire facility
– Structured bedside rounds are made every day at the same time.
– Individual units are responsible for improving their own performance.
So far, the project is making nurses and patients happy.
“Just recently a 94-year old male patient said, ‘I must be really sick because I’ve seen the doctor three times,” nurse manager, Sheri Bray recalled.
READ MORE: New report applauds Saskatchewan progress on dropping surgical wait times
According to RQHR, implementing the new workflow is a massive challenge. But feedback so far has the health region confident ACUs will extend to other hospitals in the province.
“Based on results to date, we expect that the new care principles and practices will extend to other hospital units throughout our region,” vice-president of Physician and Integrated Health Service, Dr. David McCutcheon said.
The pilot is paid for through existing resources and $305,000 of funding from the province’s Emergency Waits and Patient Flow initiative. It will continue into August, at which point research results will be analyzed.
Comments