In the wake of the Saskatoon Fire Department indicating St. Paul’s Hospital was in violation of fire code requirements, with hospital beds crowding the hallways, the Saskatchewan Health Authority held a news conference Tuesday to release the SHA Saskatoon Capacity Pressure Action Plan intended to address capacity issues in Saskatoon. The SHA says it worked with health professionals on the ground to develop the plan. Part of the action plan developed included assessing how to leverage assets in each facility with better flow of patients out of emergency at St. Paul’s hospital and RUH into Acute Care.

Andrew Will, CEO of the Saskatchewan Health Authority, describes the plan as aggressive but achievable.  To deal with the over-capacity issues in the immediate term the SHA will add 32 transitional beds by the end of November to bridge moving patients from acute care to appropriate care settings. Health care staff will be deployed to Emergency Departments and inpatient units to determine who could be cared for at home or in the community. Additional staffing is underway to support 43 additional beds at Royal University Hospital. The plan includes immediate actions, actions within 90 days and actions within three to six months.

The SHA says demands on the health system have continued to exceed available capacity partly due to increasing population growth and changing demographics.

One of the 90-day goals is to procure more community-based long term and convalescent care beds to lessen the wait times for those in hospital beds that could be in more appropriate settings. Also within the next three months, three more ICU beds will be added at RUH for patients requiring Critical Care services.

John Ash, Vice President of Integrated Saskatoon Health says a couple of the more long-term goals are more robust home health monitoring for falls prevention and chronic disease management and an assessment of inpatient bed and long-term care needs to determine the mix of acute care and long-term care beds required for now and for the future.

Here is an overview of the plan: ActionPlan-ISH-SaskatoonCapacityPressure