Emergency department redesign offers Valley patients quicker treatment

PHOENIX - The redesign of the emergency department at Phoenix Baptist Hospital is aiming to eliminate patient wait time.

After seeing the amount of patients in the waiting room increase and some people even leaving without receiving treatment, staff at Phoenix Baptist Hospital decided there needed to be a change.

"We identified a need to decrease the amount of wait time a patient waits to see a provider or before treatment is initiated," said Scott Morey, Director of the Emergency Department at Phoenix Baptist Hospital. "We had a unique opportunity in late December of last year to pull staff members and front line staff together for a time period of a week to look at how we see, treat, and discharge or see, treat, and admit patients within the emergency department."

Representatives from all parts of the hospital were involved in the week-long redesign earlier this year.

Ideas were shared between nurses, radiology, ICU, and other areas of the hospital to create the redesign and answer the question, "How could we get the patient back to the provider in a faster, more efficient way?"

So how does it work?

"The redesign is different in the fact that the patient never really goes back to the waiting room," explained Dr. Timothy Ryan, an emergency room physician at PBH. "We have a forward process. They're brought in, they're seen by a nurse and brief vital signs and assessment is done. The patient is then delivered to a different area, depending on their vital signs, to an area where we can get rapid care going."

"So the process is that we continue to move forward toward seeing the physician or physician assistant from the waiting room right into a treatment area," said Ryan.

Only a few people can be seen in the waiting room on a Monday afternoon and they aren't patients, they're friends and family of patients.

The staff is also happy with the improvement a week of collaboration brought to the hospital.

According to Ryan, admissions are quicker, X-rays are quicker, lab tests are quicker, and everything is streamlined, creating better care for patients.

"We never really use the waiting room anymore," said Ryan.