The BC Nurses’ Union says many Fraser Health hospitals have reached their breaking point and the union is ‘gravely concerned about the ongoing chaos in some Fraser Health emergency rooms.’
The union says the ER’s are overflowing, the wait times are too long and patient care has suffered as a result.
Speaking on Unfiltered with Jill Krop, Debra McPherson, president of the BC Nurses Union, says they are not exaggerating the situation.
“I’ve been to the front lines here, I’ve seen the emergency rooms, I’ve also had an opportunity to talk to our front line workers and stewards there, and this has been going on way too long, way too often and the nurses have had enough,” she says.
“Essentially we have patients backing up into the emergencies,” she adds, “often, for example, at Surrey Memorial, 40 to 65 over-capacity patients clogged in the emergency who are admitted to hospital beds, but there’s no hospital bed for them.”
“In Abbotsford, every day, at least 30 admitted patients with no place to put them, calling on level 3 over-capacity protocol, which is an all-out search for other beds.”
“And this is negatively affecting the nurses’ ability to provide care,” says McPherson.
The union says nurse-patient ratios have skyrocketed in some ER’s, because of unfilled staffing vacancies. In Surrey’s new ER last week, patients were lined up in the hall. One nurse was taking care of 11 patients. Generally the ratio should be one nurse to four stable patients.
The union provided some examples of what they are concerned about.
In Abbotsford a pediatric psych patient was in the ER for four days waiting for a ward bed. At Eagle Ridge, a dying man was read his last rights in the hallway, with 12 strangers watching. On Tuesday, a patient with a highly contagious MRSA superbug was wandering around the ER hallway and into the Tim Horton’s Coffee Shop at the Royal Columbian Hospital.
“This is not safe or appropriate patient care,” McPherson said in a release earlier in the day. “And it’s not due to a sudden spike in emergency visits. These hospitals have been dealing with chaos for weeks and months, and in Surrey, since the day the new ER opened.”
On Unfiltered, McPherson says the hospitals do not have enough acute care beds. “So we have the big, shiny new emergency, which has over 100 beds in it, and when patients are admitted they need a place to go, so we’re kind of bottle-necked there. So that’s creating some huge problems in that emergency room.”
The union says only when a few patient horror stories became public did the Fraser Health Authority respond to the crisis. In the last few days temporary measures have been put in place to ease the congestion.
The Nurses’ Union is demanding long term, permanent solutions to chronic overcapacity problems.
“Band-Aid fixes are not the way to solve chronic overcapacity problems,” McPherson said in the release. “Fraser Health officials need to get out of their boardrooms and see the chaos in the ER’s. There aren’t enough funded beds, staffing levels are grossly inadequate and it’s having a significant impact on safe patient care.”
Fraser Health did issue a statement to Unfiltered saying:
“In the past year, we have implemented a number of strategies to meet demand for services. This included: Adding new bed space in our hospitals; Formalizing discharge and transition planning to ensure the flow of patients through the system is smooth; Improving care planning; Revising the review process for patients who are in our hospitals for an extended period of time; Expanding Home First and home supports; Setting protocol for overcapacity response; Reinforcing authority and accountabilities in patient flow and strengthening physician roles in patient flow.”
McPherson says what Fraser Health is doing is not working.
“I think it’s time the leadership of the Health Authority came clean with the public,” she says. “This is an area of high population growth, a lot of new citizens in the Surrey area for example, and throughout the Fraser Valley as people search for affordable housing, young families and seniors alike, and we simply cannot meet the demand there.”
“And nurses frankly are tired of hearing the employers say ‘we’re fixing it’, and not copping to the real problem there so that the public knows it and can demand accountability, not only from the Health Authority itself, but also from the provincial government.”
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