By Sheldon Spackman and Troy Gillard

Overcapacity reaches Level 3 at Red Deer Regional Hospital

Jan 30, 2019 | 5:22 PM

High levels of patient volumes at Red Deer Regional Hospital this week led Alberta Health Services (AHS) to implement a Level 3 Overcapacity Protocol (OCP).

AHS officials say overcapacity protocol is designed to ensure the flow of patients and delivery of services continues when hospital resources are strained, adding the OCP system has four levels in all.

Allan Sinclair, AHS Senior Operating Officer for Red Deer and surrounding area says pressures at the facility have been especially challenging this week, with the Level 3 OCP instated late in the day on Monday and still in effect Wednesday afternoon.

“It’s been a fairly long space of time where we’ve had real capacity and demand pressures,” says Sinclair. “That’s not uncommon in the winter. Sometimes we get outbreaks or other things that happen to us and this time there was no one theme, there were some injuries and some cardiacs and some respiratory but there wasn’t anything like an outbreak that was happening, just a volume of service that was happening for a few days in-a-row and much higher than typical.”

Level 3 OCP is described as a situation where the hospital is too full to safely treat patients coming in without needing to move others out to facilities elsewhere.

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Sinclair explains that AHS continually tweaks its protocols to ensure they’re using the space at Red Deer Regional Hospital as efficiently as possible.

“Also, that we’re providing opportunities for outlying sites,” he explains. “Both to get their patients in and because we at Red Deer site here have a very high concentration of the specialty services that our rural partners need access to. We need to be able sometimes to repatriate patients back to the rural sites as quickly as possible, so that we’ve freed up that specialty space that’s here in this building.”

Sinclair adds the OCP protocols help them identify patients for repatriation to rural sites, move patients more efficiently through the building and ensure access to specialty care is being preserved at Red Deer Regional Hospital.

He says it’s not often a Level 3 OCP is declared at Red Deer Regional Hospital.

“I think there probably would have been three periods of time or three portions of a week since October and November and here that we’ve had that,” he exclaims. “And it may happen again, we’re prepared for that. One of the messages I know we shared last time was to make it clear that there are certainly times where the pressure gets high but at no time were ambulances or EMS crews diverted from the site.”

In addition, whether it was access to specialty care, diagnostics, an MRI, surgical or ICU, Sinclair says never did they have to divert those types of cases.

“Usually, when any of the larger hospitals get busy, they tend to get busy for a few days,” he explains. “It’s not a flash in the pan because it is a volume service of both what you currently have in the hospital, as well as what’s coming into the hospital. It’s usually not a quick thing to get into a high pressure situation.”

Sinclair commends staff and physicians at the hospital for pulling together this week and maintaining a good level of service quality during its Over Capacity Protocol.

“It’s just that some of the things people would note, wait times in emerge were certainly longer than average and sometimes they can be long here at this site,” he admits. “People who need care quickly get it quickly and there are other patients that wait longer. With this particular episode, we would be moving patients within the hospital and moving patients out of the hospital and that can be disruptive to families, we recognize that but we need to make sure that we’re providing that access to specialty care.”