Queensway Carleton Hospital cuts ambulance offload delays in ER by 90 minutes

The Queensway Carleton Hospital says new initiatives at the ER are freeing up paramedics to respond to other calls. CTV’s Dylan Dyson reports.

The Queensway Carleton Hospital is crediting “targeted improvements” for reducing ambulance offload wait times in its emergency department by more than an hour.

The hospital in Ottawa’s west end launched an “ED Xcellence Project” to reduce waiting times in the emergency room and improve patient safety. As part of the project, staff began focusing on ambulance offload wait times.

In a post on its website, the Queensway-Carleton Hospital says it has “slashed ambulance offload wait times to just 36 minutes in only eight months.” According to the Queensway-Carleton Hospital’s annual report, the offload wait time went from 131 minutes in July 2024 to 36 minutes in March.

The hospital credited “targeted improvements” under its “ED Xcellence Project,” including the EMS Check-In, the Offload registered nurse (RN), and its Fit2Sit Program.

“With an investment from the City of Ottawa, we now are able to staff that hallway 24 hours a day and make sure that we have the opportunity to triage those patients the moment that they arrive to our site,” said ER clinical manager Kristalee Grist. “Paramedics offload them and bring them into our hallway. The paramedics pick up a phone. They call our ambulance offload nurse who carries a portable phone. And that ambulance offload nurse presents to the triage desk.”

The 2024 Ottawa Paramedic Service’s annual report showed the average ambulance offload wait time at the Queensway-Carleton Hospital was 144 minutes in 2024, down from 171.81 minutes in 2023 and 167 minutes in 2022.

• Ottawa paramedics spending less time waiting to offload patients in ERs, report shows

The EMS Check-In at the Queensway-Carleton Hospital allows paramedics to arrive at the offload desk and call the triage nurse by phone. “It ensures timely and accurate patient handovers,” according to the hospital.

“As offload delay has decreased, as we’ve seen with all the hospitals, the incidence of level zero, where there’s nobody available to respond has also dropped precipitously,” said Ottawa Paramedic Chief Pierre Poirier. “Where we were seeing hundreds of hours a month of level zero, now we just see minutes.”

The Offload RN program places a dedicated nurse in the emergency department to provide care to patients until they are moved to staff in the emergency department, allowing paramedics to return to duty and respond to other calls.

The Fit2Sit program allows patients with non-life-threatening illnesses and injuries who arrive at the hospital by ambulance, to sit in the waiting room upon arrival and allow paramedics to return to service.

Ambulance offload wait times refer to the length of time paramedics wait with a patient in the emergency department until they are transferred to the care of the hospital.

According to the paramedic service, the industry accepted performance target for the transfer of care from paramedics to hospital staff is 30 minutes in the 90th percentile.

With files from CTV News Ottawa’s Dylan Dyson