Waiting time for urgent medical attention in a tertiary hospital after the implementation of a process improvement program
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15381/anales.v80i4.16705Keywords:
Urgencias Médicas, Triaje, Listas de Espera, Gestión de CalidadAbstract
Introduction. Overcrowding in emergency department of tertiary hospitals collapses its processes and prolongs waiting times. Objective. To evaluate waiting times for patients with urgent medical problems, in an emergency department after implementing a program of process improvement with facilitators. Methods. An observational study. Patients older than 14 years-old with priority III problems, who were attended between 6-23 hours, were included in the study. The team of facilitators was made up of trained administrative technicians (two each 8-hour period per day), who accelerated the diagnostic and therapeutic processes in outpatient. Waiting time for first attention and total length of stay in emergency services were measured. Results. 36 thousand attentions of priority III were evaluated, being higher in the fourth quarter of the year, on Monday, between 7 and 11 am. The median waiting time for arrival to provider was 35 minutes, and median time of length of stay in emergency was 2.9 hours. It were being longer when interconsultation is requested to another specialty (5 hours). 90% of attentions had a length stay in emergency less than five hours. Conclusion. The waiting time for emergency attention in priority III patients, after implementation of the process facilitator program, was similar to international standards.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2019 Anales de la Facultad de Medicina
![Creative Commons License](http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc-sa/4.0/88x31.png)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Those authors who have publications with this magazine accept the following terms:
- Authors will retain their copyrights and guarantee the journal the right of first publication of their work, which will be simultaneously subject to Creative Commons Attribution License that allows third parties to share the work as long as its author and its first publication this magazine are indicated.
- Authors may adopt other non-exclusive licensing agreements for the distribution of the version of the published work (eg, deposit it in an institutional electronic file or publish it in a monographic volume) provided that the initial publication in this magazine is indicated.
- Authors are allowed and recommended to disseminate their work over the Internet (eg: in institutional telematic archives or on their website) before and during the submission process, which It can produce interesting exchanges and increase quotes from the published work. (See El efecto del acceso abierto ).