Provincial Overcapacity Protocol/Clinical Standard
The Saskatchewan Health Authority (SHA) strategic direction includes providing seamless care as close to home as possible. Part of this strategy is to improve health outcomes and patient flow.
As a single provincial health organization, we experience ebbs and flows of patient demand for our acute care facilities. During peaks, we can see demand exceeding our ability to move patients swiftly through our emergency departments and into inpatient bed, and moving patients to services outside our hospitals.
Demand exceeding capacity creates overcrowding and challenges to maintaining patient and staff safety. We need to ensure we are maximizing our capacity across our all of our services. As a single provincial health authority, we can better coordinate and flow patients to the most appropriate level of care to meet their needs as close to home as possible.
As an accreditation standard, an overcapacity protocol (OCP) consistently measures capacity pressure risks and triggers system-wide actions in response to overcrowding situations. Actions are taken to safely expediting patient flow out of the concentrated overcrowded areas, level-loading, and addressing the safety risks across our services.
System flow teams work closely with local operations to coordinate and right match patients to the right level of care, while balancing occupancy levels across our sites.
The goal of the provincial overcapacity standard protocol: reduce the safety risk by not overloading any one unit or site with critically unsafe overcrowding situations by safely expediting patient flow and level loading patient demand to right capacity closest to home, sharing that risk as a whole system.
The team had also developed a toolkit package that includes: Clinical Standard Documents, a guide to writing local OCP, OCP template, key messages, huddle notes, Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), etc.
Implementation plan/go live dates
- Phase 1: Regina; Saskatoon; Integrated Rural – June 12, 2023
- Phase 2: Integrated North – June 19, 2023
Clinical Standard
Town Hall
Town Hall Presentation Video - Provincial Overcapacity Management Standards
Instructions and toolkit
NOTE: Areas are to follow instructions outlined below and email local overcapacity documents, once complete, to Cindy Taylor. Once complete, they will be uploaded to this website in your Local Work Standards.
Related documents
Local work standards
Includes closed beds, patient transfer decline escalation, admission in ER.