By Ashley Legassic

RIH says 2018 was busiest year in history for emergency department

Jan 4, 2019 | 3:30 PM

KAMLOOPS — The head of the emergency department at Royal Inland Hospital says 2018 was the busiest year the hospital has experienced.

Dr. Henk Van Zyl says the holiday season was particularly packed in the emergency room, thanks to several contributing factors.

“Our numbers over the Christmas, New Year’s (holidays) was in excess of 250 visits a day for some days, which is the highest it’s ever been in the history of the hospital. So we’ve been super busy,” he says. “I don’t know whether we can attribute all of that volume to the flu… viruses — (it) could be different factors playing into that: the availability of primary care in our community, the lack of family physicians over the Christmas, New Year’s time, as well as the closing of one of the walk-in clinics.”

“All of these different factors always play a role into how many visits we actually see in the emergency department, but just from our perspective it has been a very, very busy year.”

The emergency department measures its capacity by how many inpatient beds are occupied.

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“For the last year, we’ve been running about 100 per cent (capacity). When we get to the flu season, these numbers have gone as high as 130, nearly 140 per cent recently, but the staff has been working very hard to get flow through and so… we have been able to contain those numbers,” Van Zyl says.

Although the recent opening of the Urgent Primary Care Centre (UPCC) at RIH has offered some reprieve to the waiting room, Van Zyl says it’s not enough, especially with the closure of the Summit Medical Clinic.

“Certainly a lot more has to be done,” he says. “The capacity for visits for the UPCC is around 16 to 18 visits per day, so… it does ease a little bit of the load but certainly in the context of the Summit Clinic closing, they were seeing in excess of 10,000 patients a year which is a much larger number than the capacity of the UPCC. So at this point in time certainly we still need much more capacity for primary care visits in our community.”

The lack of primary care facilities in Kamloops means residents who are ill but don’t need to be treated immediately are presenting at the emergency room. Van Zyl says roughly 20 to 30 per cent of cases in the department are in a “lower category” when being triaged. This usually means emergency care is not required, but it is a case-by-case basis.

Flu season has also had an impact on the higher volume the hospital is dealing with.

“People often ask us when they should actually come, and from our perspective we say that if you run a very high fever, if your fever has been going on for a couple of days, or you have a young child, say less than six months or so, that has a fever of more than 38 C then you should probably come in,” Van Zyl says.

“Obviously if you have problems like a wheezy chest or you find it very difficult to breathe, these sort of symptoms are concerning symptoms. But most of the time we don’t want everybody to just rush in with the influenza, but rather to manage it at home, to not go to work, try not to spread it to other people by general precautions and hygiene.”