Cardiac patients at times face life-or-death situations and need timely care. In Salmon Arm, they are receiving that quick care thanks to the work of the cardiology team.
After watching wait times for stress tests and Holter monitoring grow, the team readjusted schedules and reprioritized resources to provide the timely care needed.
“Patients come to the emergency room in Salmon Arm with chest pain. They need a stress test to make sure it’s not a heart attack or angina,” notes Dr. Laurie Main, general internist at Shuswap Lake General Hospital.
Dr. Main says patients were returning home after a visit to the emergency room with few answers about the status of their heart. They were also waiting up to a month to get a stress test, compared to the mandated wait time of two weeks.
“Before, patients would go home and have no idea what’s going on with their heart and wait weeks on end to get their stress test,” she says.
Now, patients are waiting just days.
Increasing the number of Holter monitors from eight to 20 has allowed the hospital to reduce wait times by almost 23 per cent and increase capacity for stress testing by 44 per cent.
The team also spent time optimizing the scheduling process to accommodate additional patients.
“Our cardiac technologists said, ‘Well, we don’t really need that much time to get the patient on a treadmill and get the stress test done,’” says Dr. Main. “We worked on scheduling optimization, reducing the time spent on each test, so we are able to see one more patient a day for the treadmill.” Doing that every day of the week allows five more patients to have their tests while using existing resources she explains.
Patients like Victor Hooper, who has a history of cardiac issues and often needs immediate care to be monitored, have noticed the positive changes.
“It’s really good. In the last three months, I’ve been in three times for cardioversions because I went into [atrial fibrillation], and they run me through and get it done,” he says. “They’re on it. [The process] works really well. The nurses and doctors are amazing.”
