Canadian health care struggles to find a cure for hallway medicine

The hallway in Surrey Memorial Hospital where Karen Sidhu stayed for three days. Karen Sidhu

 

Jack Webb died in a Halifax hospital on Feb. 1, after sitting in a chilly emergency room hallway for six hours and being bumped from a room by another dying patient during his five-day stay. Over the last few months, there have been a flurry of stories from patients across Canada, complaining that they were kept in hospital hallways because of overcrowding. recently spent three days in the hallway, after being admitted for internal bleeding. «When my doctor came to see me, there were people standing around and he was talking about my private, personal information about the treatment I was about to go through,» the woman, Karen Sidhu, told Global News.

Not enough beds in hospital wards

Alan Drummond, co-chair of public affairs for the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians, believes that this problem exists in every province. He says the problem isn’t in the emergency room, but a little further up the chain, in the hospital wards. «You get a patient that comes to the emergency department, they’re frail, they’re elderly, they’re sick. There’s no ward beds to go to so they end up occupying an emergency treatment stretcher,» he said.

Indignity and medical complications

«It’s not pleasant to sit in a waiting room for eight hours with a bunch of sick other people,» said Drummond, though he is more concerned about people lying in hallways than sitting in the emergency waiting room. «That’s where you have your mother or grandmother in the hospital, admitted but can’t get to the ward. » Too much focus has been on improving primary care, he said, which he doesn’t think helps to solve the problem at the hospital. Grant Innes, an emergency physician at the University of Calgary, co-authored a paper which studied 29 Canadian hospitals and found that patients were spending an average of about 48,000 hours a year in ERs due to being «blocked» from entry into other wards.

He calculates this is only about 1.5 per cent of overall bed hours at the hospitals, prompting him to argue much of the problem may be solved if hospitals improve their management of existing beds.

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Source: Leslie Young | Global News