Health officials in Saskatoon are hoping a new project will reduce the number of unnecessary emergency visits at the city’s hospitals.
The health region announced Thursday a project, set to launch March 9, that will see one paramedic monitor two long-term care homes in the city.
“Our paramedics are seeing what’s happening with the treatment and transport of the seniors all the time now. They’ve even come and said, ‘We could have taken care of this in the nursing home,’” said MD Ambulance chief operating officer Gerry Schriemer.
The health region said, in the past three months, 200 residents from the city’s 30 long-term care homes were taken by ambulance to hospital emergency departments in the city. Many of those visits were not medical emergencies.
The 90-day pilot project will see a paramedic available seven days a week for 12 hours a day to perform geriatric assessments at Luther Special Care Home and Porteous Lodge.
The paramedic, who will be stationed at one of the two homes, will determine if residents can be treated on-site and, if necessary, provide non-acute bedside care. MD Ambulance recently hired four new paramedics to help with the project.
The region’s goal is to reduce the need for ambulance transport to emergency departments from the two care homes by 25 per cent.
They’ll expand the project, which is based on a model created in Nova Scotia called the Extended Care Paramedics Program, if it is successful.
“We’re starting small just to see what the volume is,” said Rod MacKenzie, the region’s director of emergency medical services.
The project has been in the works for years, MacKenzie said, but likely would have taken another year to implement without the region’s recent 14-day experiment —dubbed The Better Every Day 14-Day Challenge.
The challenge, posed by president and CEO Dan Florizone, called for the region to halt regular activities in order to tackle overcapacity issues in the city’s hospitals.
