ER Wait

We track the time medicine patients spend in the ER before being admitted to a medicine ward bed.

Purposes of collecting "ER Wait" data:

To assess the "time delay" from when a patient is first accepted to Medicine Service while in the site's own ER (emergency room) to when the patient actually arrives in a medicine ward bed of the same hospital. (This is done in conjunction with admit time).

Collection Guideline

For every patient admitted from the ER, enter date and time arrived to medicine ward bed

• Any patient admitted from the ER must have one ER Wait date/time entered into tmp file. It does not matter if first bed moved to into an in-service or off-service bed.

• project: ER_Wait
• as appropriate one of the following items
  • ER admission - is a patient who is admitted TO a medicine service physician FROM a ER physician service.
  • Direct Admission - A direct admission means direct admission TO medicine physician service but for some reason parked in ER before going to a ward bed. These patients are NOT admitted under a ER physician service prior to being accepted to medicine service. (NOTE: Inter-facility transfers in the region, e.g. ward to another hospital's ward, are not included in this project.)

• the date & time arrived in med ward bed from the unit log or nurses note.

TMP file entry

• PROJECT: ER_Wait
• ITEM: ER Admit or direct admit
• E: Date (arrived on ward bed)
• M: time (arrived to ward bed)

Collection Parameters

• Start and stop date
  • Start Date: June 4, 2011
  • Stop Date: none
• Data is sent when complete and upon final check.
• Data is saved in L_TmpV2 under Project 'ER_Wait' of the centralized_data.mdb
• Prior ER Wait data
  • From Sept 1, 2007 to June 3, 2011, ER wait is under the Project 'Moves' (Moves for Medicine).
  • Note that the collection guideline of the Project 'Moves' is different from the Project ER_Wait.

Reporting and Analysis

• ER Wait is calculated as the difference between the Arrival in Ward Date_time - Admit Date_Time
• The SAS Program to read the data is in X:\Julie\SAS_CFE\CFE_macros\CFE_ERWait.sas

Template:Data Integrity Checks

ER Wait and from-ER consistency

• uses the following queries
  • s_tmp_ER_Wait_has_tmp_not_from_ER - error if ER wait entry but is not from ER
  • s_tmp_ER_Wait_from_ER_no_ER_Wait - error if from ER but has no ER wait entry
  • s_tmp_ER_Wait_chronological - error if tmp date/time is null or is <= admit date/time
  • s_tmp_ER_Wait_long_delay - gives error if delay is > 3 days

Data Structure

We capture ER Wait (moves) in L_TmpV2. The data is sent to and stored in TmpV2_1.mdb.