Patients are stacking up in Prince George's hospital emergency room because there is a shortage of seniors' care and other social
infrastructure.
According to doctors in the ER, patients have been stacking up into hallways and meeting rooms and the annual flu season hasn't even hit yet. They trace the issue up the health-care ladder to a lack of beds for seniors with health
issues.
"When Gateway [seniors' care facility at 20th Avenue and Victoria Street] we saw a very small improvement, but the need is so huge it didn't fix the issue. We need more places like Jubilee Lodge and Alward Place," said Dr. Zoe Redenbach, an ER doctor and representative of the Prince George Division of Family Practice, a physician's coalition working on northern medical
innovations.
One of those innovations is a clinic dedicated to unattached patients [those with no family doctor] with complex health needs.
It is expected to open sometime this winter. The hope is, by giving about 5,000 of those patients (there are 10,000 others with less complex issues] a regular doctor and support team, fewer of them will need to drop into the ER or other walk-in
clinics.
Redenbach said this was bound to take some pressure off the emergency room.
"[However, most] of the people coming to ER are attached patients [those who already have a family doctor] but they need help for something urgent. When they get here they have to share space with people in beds spread all over [emergency] because there is nowhere else in the hospital to put them."
A big reason why the wards are full around the hospital is because elderly patients have no place to heal from a myriad number of health-care problems. They could recover at a dedicated seniors' care facility or even at home, Redenbach said, but those supports are not there in a big enough way.
A spokesperson from the provincial Ministry of Health said the ER overcrowding was not unique to Prince George but Redenbach was correct, the challenge "involves an aging population and changing demographics."
A two-year rollout of $250 million earmarked for ER improvements was already underway, said the ministry source, and Northern B.C. has already gotten $13 million of that. Plus some pilot projects were showing positive signs:
Pilot projects on the Lower Mainland have resulted in 107 per cent more patients being treated and discharged within the two-hour target in Fraser Health and 22 per cent more patients being treated and discharged within two hours in Vancouver Coastal Health.
Wait times for patients with less urgent conditions at Nanaimo General have been reduced between 20 and 40 per cent since patient streaming was introduced in 2009.
It will take time for those innovations and renovations to have any effect. Until then, said Redenbach, the question she and her ER colleagues are asking is why there? Of all the places to stress out with overcrowding, why an emergency room?
"It most definitely affects our ability to do our jobs, but they keep choosing to place these patients in ER," she said. "If they are going to be in temporary beds out in the hallway, or crammed into temporary rooms, why not do that somewhere less sensitive than an emergency room."
Another ER doctor, Daryl Leiski, argued that some of these treatment areas required privacy, that the patients in ER were often in poor health and should not be mixing with patients simply bedridden for four or five days at a time.
"It isn't always this bad, but right now it is hallway medicine," Leiski said, and it is just as bad or worse in Surrey, where he also practices.
"You have to unload the back end of the hospital to free up the front end where we are.
"Maybe there needs to be an observation unit, where patients can go who need to be monitored but they don't have the acuity, they just need bed-rest for a few days. That doesn't even have to be onsite. Maybe there needs to be a separate ward for short-term patients coming into ER who just need to rehydrate, which is a common problem we see. There are a lot of little steps we can take."
Leiski said, "I can work in these conditions, it's not about the staff," but the patients are in inappropriate places for the medical attention they each need.
