SAN FRANCISCO, May 25 /PRNewswire/ -- With spiraling ambulance diversion rates and an alarming decline in patient capacity, City officials and health care experts in San Francisco have been hard at work to reverse the City’s emergency care crisis. Last week, a City-wide task force charged with addressing the issue announced some very positive results at one of San Francisco’s busiest emergency departments.
The Hospital Diversion Task Force announced that Saint Francis Memorial Hospital, the City’s second busiest emergency department after San Francisco General Hospital, achieved a diversion rate of eight percent in March and ten percent in April, well below the County’s target rate of 15 percent and its lowest rate in recent memory.
Diversion rate is the percent of ambulance traffic that a hospital must turn away, (i.e., “divert” to another hospital) as a result of reaching patient capacity. San Francisco convened the Hospital Diversion Task Force in 2002 at the behest of Mayor (at that time, Supervisor) Gavin Newsom to study the problem of diversion rates throughout the City.
“Ambulance diversion is a significant problem in all urban areas, but particularly in San Francisco, where diversion rates have been escalating for the past five years,” said Mayor Newsom. “I congratulate the Saint Francis team for the work they’ve done and for leading the way in helping resolve this critical challenge.”
Saint Francis had been averaging a diversion rate of about 17 percent over the past year, with rates exceeding 20 percent in some months. A host of internal changes and new systems were implemented to bring diversion rates down.
“We increased staff and training with a focus on rapid patient evaluation, in addition to enhancing our ancillary services,” said Saint Francis President and CEO Cheryl A. Fama. “Most important, our new Emergency Department Medical Director, Dr. William Webster, has provided tremendous leadership. We are very proud and gratified to be able to accept more ambulance traffic and provide more access to emergency care.”
The new systems in place at Saint Francis mirror a nationwide trend in emergency department management designed to increase capacity by optimizing “throughput,” or patient length of stay. “The better we are at reducing the time it takes to process and evaluate each patient, the more patients we’re able to receive and serve,” said Dr. Webster.
In addition to the internal changes, another factor contributing to the decrease in the diversion rate at Saint Francis has been the success of the McMillan Stabilization Center, a medically supervised sobering center designed to divert intoxicated persons from City emergency departments. “Saint Francis is heavily invested in the McMillan Center and the entire community is benefiting from that investment,” said Dr. Webster.
About Saint Francis Memorial Hospital:
Located atop Nob Hill in San Francisco, Saint Francis Memorial Hospital meets the health care needs of the community with a wide spectrum of programs and services. Saint Francis is renowned for orthopedic specialties in sports medicine, spine injuries and joint replacement as well as comprehensive burn and wound care and occupational health. For more, visit http://www.saintfrancismemorial.org/ .
Saint Francis Memorial Hospital
CONTACT: Jeff Fox or Kathryn Pellegrini, both for Saint Francis MemorialHospital, +1-415-403-0800
Web site: http://www.saintfrancismemorial.org/
