TY - JOUR T1 - Reducing congestion in the emergency driveway of a small hospital in New Delhi, India JF - BMJ Open Quality JO - BMJ Open Qual DO - 10.1136/bmjoq-2021-001398 VL - 10 IS - Suppl 1 SP - e001398 AU - Saru Bhartia AU - Pradaya Wahi AU - Ashok Sharma Y1 - 2021/07/01 UR - http://bmjopenquality.bmj.com/content/10/Suppl_1/e001398.abstract N2 - Hospital parking contributes to poor patient care1 and is a common patient problem2 3 in many facilities including ours. Sitaram Bhartia Institute of Science and Research (SBISR) in New Delhi, India was built as a research facility that later started offering outpatient and inpatient medical services. As the building was not designed to be a hospital, there is only a narrow driveway allowing single lane traffic to and from the emergency drop off area (figure 1). Since this driveway is used by all the vehicles entering the hospital, this leads to the congestion and hinders ambulance movement. We have used quality improvement (QI) methodology to deliver better clinical care since 2010 and we decided to try this methodology to reduce congestion in the emergency driveway.Figure 1 Vehicle movement in front of the emergency passage.Before the initiation of the project, all vehicles approaching hospital gate were entering through the emergency driveway. We took up the improvement initiative with an aim to reduce the number of vehicles entering the emergency driveway. We formed a team consisting of a security manager, security guard, billing clerk, quality officer and quality consultant. Security guards had data about three categories of vehicles entering the emergency driveway. The first category was of vehicles that picked up inpatients, typically from the emergency drop-off area, who had been discharged (median of 200 vehicles per month). The second category was of vehicles that dropped off outpatients (median of 900 vehicles per month). The third category of vehicles entered for other reasons such as collection of biomedical waste, laundry, and so on. The number of vehicles in the third category was small so the team decided … ER -