Queensway Carleton Hospital hopes virtual care can help reduce wait times, post-pandemic

A visit to a hospital emergency room might require a mask for the foreseeable future, but it might also be a little less crowded.

The President and CEO of the Queensway Carleton Hospital (QCH) says his staff has learned to adapt to the changing world, and he hopes virtual care is here to stay.

“As a patient myself at times I visit my family doctor by telephone and it's kind of nice I don't have to sit in the waiting room and wait around. I just wait for a call basically,” explained Dr. Andrew Falconer in an interview with The Sam Laprade Show on CityNews.

He adds that virtual care could help one of the long-standing issues for hospitals.

“I'm hoping the days of super-crowded waiting rooms where you're catching more colds and that kind of stuff from folks sitting around you are gone.”

Dr. Falconer was the former chief of staff at QCH, and was one of the authors of their pandemic preparedness plan, but says there's still things he wishes they'd done differently.

“As we entered into the third wave, we had learned that it's not necessary to shut down access to absolutely everything at the hospital and try to keep some services going, just to try to avoid the health consequences of no access to surgery and that sort of thing. So I think had we got to do it over again, we may have had an opportunity to have a more measured response, particularly at the beginning.”

He says this would have allowed them to continue with non-emergency surgeries, which they weren't doing for months.