The B.C. government has allocated an additional $261,000 to emergency care at the University Hospital for Northern B.C in Prince George to ease patient congestion and wait times.
"Prince George has the busiest emergency room in the North, so it's imperative that we look at ways to increase its efficiency and decrease wait times," says Prince George-Valemount MLA Shirley Bond during the Wednesday announcement.
The funds are being allocated as patient-focused funding which is a method targeting the money for quantity and quality health-care services.
These funds will be invested in a variety of projects aimed at moving patients either into a hospital bed or back into the community within certain time frames.
The BC Health Services Purchasing Organization, established in the spring, directs dollars based on recommendations from clinical experts in each health authority.
Each emergency department measures the time from when patients arrive to when they are treated and either discharged or admitted to the hospital, and categorizes these patients based on the complexity of their medical needs.
With patient-focused funding, reducing wait times earns financial rewards the health authorities can reinvest in further improvements to patient care.
"Extensive trials have shown that the patient-focused funding model achieves these goals. More funding through this model will mean better patient care in the North," said Bond.
The announced funding is part of $250 million announced earlier this year to implement provincewide patient-focused funding.
By 2012-13 the proportion of money tied to patient-focused funding is expected to reach 20 per cent of eligible health-care spending while the other 80 per cent will remain as block funding.
This additional funding - $80 million in 2010-11 and $170 million in 2011-12 - will be distributed among the 15 B.C. emergency departments that account for almost half of the ER visits in the province, including hospitals in the Lower Mainland, on Vancouver Island, in the Interior and in the North. Health authorities will have access to this money on top of their projected budget increase of 15 per cent over the next three years so they can continue to enhance service quality and patient care.
