Improving Access to Acute Care Services

Prolonged waits and delays are common in acute care settings. Impeded patient flow through BC acute care hospitals reduces the quality of care and leads to poor patient outcomes, including lengthy waits for hospital admissions (e.g., emergency department overcrowding), cancellation of scheduled admissions and procedures, and increasingly strained working conditions for healthcare workers.

Given that acute care beds are fundamental to service provision in the hospital and the resource to which all other resources are mapped, changes in acute care bed capacity can have important consequences for service delivery and quality of care. BC is experiencing difficulties in providing hospital care in a timely manner due, in part, to significant cuts in the number of acute care beds over the past decade. Efforts to improve access to acute care must focus on establishing wait time benchmarks for acute care, increasing the supply of functional acute care beds, managing beds effectively, investing in community-based care, and improving government accountability.

The Doctors of BC calls on the provincial government to adopt transparent and publicly available principles for the supply and effective management of functional acute care beds across British Columbia. 

For the full policy paper, please see “Improving Access to Acute Care Services”.