The taming of the queue III : Wait time measurement, monitoring and management: where the rubber meets the road

This encompasses changes in culture and in the expectations of health professionals, the optimization of professional standards, the development and incorporation of team-based approaches to system management, and the value of service oriented approaches. [...] Provincial Focus The rest of the morning of the first day was devoted to examining the progress being made across the country in wait time management in the provinces. [...] The aim of this project is to decrease the average waiting time in the ED, to standardize the processes and reduce the variability in wait times and high level process times. [...] Claudia Sanmartin (Senior Researcher in the Health Analysis and Measurement Group at Statistics Canada and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Community Health Science at the University of Calgary) presented on the results from the 2005 Health Services Access Survey (HSAS) and the interplay between waiting times, the burden of waiting and outcome measures. [...] He described the complex methodological approach taken by his team which included the utilization of expert opinion, an analysis of existing benchmarks, radiobiological models (based on the relationship between the volume of the tumour and the risk of reoccurrence and on the observed growth rate of the tumour), the direct observations of associations between wait times and reoccurrence in clinical