Command centre at Windsor Regional Hospital improving bed wait times

The new command centre at Windsor Regional Hospital has been showinggreat results, according to hospital officials.

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Chief nursing executive Karen McCullough said wait times for beds have improved since the centre first open in October 2017.

"Before we started to do this work it took 11 hours to get a patient to a bed now with the command centre, with the nurses, with the admitting clerks all working together in the command centre, we cut that down to an average of two and a half hours at Met and three and a half hours at Ouellette," explained McCullough.

There are two command centres, one at each campus. McCullough describes it as a system of communicationsimilar to an "air traffic control centre". All patients are monitored through the central hub from admission to discharge.

"We've got a lot of technology in place and a lot of paper-based information,"saidMcCullough."Every day we have people assigned to knowing and tracking where are all of the patients in the organization are and [making sure] everybody is where they need to be and if not, asking 'How do we get them to the appropriate bed?'"

The centre is staffed around the clock. Everyday at 10:30 a.m. and 4:30p.m. "system huddles" are held where staff from both campuses update each other on the patient flow of each unit.

"The hospital has patients coming in 24/7 and if we don't know what's happening every hour of every day, then we just create our own barriers and our own delays," explained McCullough,

The centre currently operateson paper and white boards. Officials hope to go digital within the next six months.