News

Community Report: Southlake Checkup

Newmarket , Ontario – October 24, 2007 - We invite you to read about some of Southlake’s major accomplishments during the past several months. You will also meet some of the great people who work and volunteer at the Hospital, and learn about what Southlake is doing to improve the services it delivers.

Southlake Check-up

Improving Wait Times at Southlake
At Southlake, we are very aware of the frustration that patients and their families experience when they face lengthy wait times when expecting care at our Hospital, especially when it requires admission to a hospital bed.

There are many complex factors that contribute to such wait times, including:

• An exploding and aging population. For the past three years, acute in-patient volumes at Southlake have increased by 9 per cent per year. This is unprecedented and not experienced anywhere else in the province.
• Provincial shortage of long-term care beds. At times, 40+ admitted patients at Southlake are waiting for a bed to become available in a long-term care facility. The effect that this has on our ability to assign post-surgery patients or those waiting in the Emergency Department to a hospital bed is, at best, challenging, exhausting, and extremely time consuming. 
• Southlake’s growing reputation as a centre of excellence is drawing more and more patients to our Hospital. In fact, Southlake is ranked 9th in Ontario for treating highly complex or life- threatening conditions. Those hospitals that rank 1 to 8 are teaching hospitals.

Although Southlake does not have the ability to address all of the challenges that plague Ontario’s healthcare system, we have taken many steps to reduce wait times at our facility.
 These include:

• Expanding our facility by adding more in-patient beds
• Hiring more nurses
• Recruiting more physicians (e.g., orthopaedic surgeons, hospitalists, etc.)
• Expanding the size and hours of operation within our diagnostic clinic space (e.g., opening of the new Out-patient Diagnostic Imaging Centre in the Medical Arts Building)
• Purchasing new, additional diagnostic equipment (e.g., a new MRI, two new Cat Scanners, three digital mammography machines, etc. were recently installed at Southlake.)
• Opening a Discharge Lounge on busy days where patients who are discharged in the morning can wait until such time as a family member or friend can pick them up
• Introducing a new discharge policy to move patients awaiting placement in a long-term care facility more quickly
• Working with community partners to make home care available more readily

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