As hospitals throughout New Brunswick are stretched beyond their limits, residents who’ve recently spent extensive periods inside the province’s emergency departments are speaking out about their experiences.
Don Darling, whose mother recently passed away after being diagnosed with cancer less than a month ago, said despite his mother suffering a health crisis upon her arrival to the Dr. Everett Chalmers Regional Hospital in Fredericton — she wanted to leave due to the “chaos of the environment.”
“There are people stacked everywhere, the rooms are full, the health-care workers are in hyper mode in everything they’re doing,” he said.
Darling said prior to his mother’s diagnosis on Dec. 8, she endured two other visits to the hospital. On the first occasion, she left after waiting for four hours. Upon her return on Dec. 2, during a period of “extreme pain”, she waited 16 hours before she was seen by a physician.
“My mom was in immense pain … and I said to my sister ‘Don’t let her leave’,” he said, adding that his mother’s diagnosis ended up being considered a pulled muscle. A few days later, she was brought back to the hospital by ambulance and diagnosed with cancer.
On the day of his mother’s passing last week, Darling said he visited the emergency department of the hospital.
“Busting at the seams, people up and down the hallways, paramedics standing around with their patients because they couldn’t hand them off to the system,” he said, describing what he witnessed during his most recent visit.
Despite the chaotic environment, Darling expressed gratitude for the attention and compassion displayed by his mother’s care providers in her final days.
“Having just witnessed a loved one in the health-care system and witnessed the heroism, care, and compassion of health-care workers … but at the same time, there are balls being dropped and there are issues that are impacting patients’ lives,” he continued. “I don’t know how you retain health-care workers, asking them to work in the kind of chaos that they’re going into.”
In a statement provided to Global News on Wednesday, the New Brunswick Nursing Union said inadequate staffing levels are contributing to patients not receiving “anywhere close to the level of care nurses would normally provide.”
“Providing services to the public with less than adequate staffing levels creates a chaotic environment that nurses have had to endure for far too long, and it’s taking a toll on everyone,” the statement read. “New Brunswickers deserve far better than they are receiving.”
“I’m afraid for what my future brings”
Adam Spencer, a Fredericton resident whose father died of cancer in 2022, said despite hospital staff at Dr. Everett Chalmers Regional Hospital doing everything they could, coordinating the required care for his dad during the final months of his life was a challenge.
“The backup in waiting time, even for somebody who they know is in his last couple of weeks of life, was still days. Days where he was in agony for a procedure that literally takes an hour or so to get done,” he said, adding that he thinks his father would’ve experienced even longer delays if it wasn’t for certain doctors advocating on his father’s behalf to ensure he received “some degree of attention. Ultimately, he did get the procedure done … but honestly, at a point where it was too late for him.”
Spencer said despite his father being kept inside a “storage closet” at the hospital during his final days, he never heard any complaints from his dad.
“He had a great attitude about all of this, but I think it’s hard to be optimistic and upbeat for your family while acutely aware of how dark the situation actually is.”
Spencer said a week after travelling back from an operation that his father received in Halifax around Christmas time last year, an incision on his dad’s stomach split open. He said despite a rapidly declining health situation, he and his father experienced a lengthy waiting period upon their arrival at the hospital.
“We were literally up there in offload, in the hallway of the DECH for … between 10 to 13 hours, I would say, sitting in that hallway,” he continued. “I was sitting there wondering ‘Is it worth us sitting here to do this?’, knowing that he’s got this incision open on his stomach, COVID is everywhere, there’s patients all through the hallway.”
Spencer said this particular incident was when he first learned that EMT workers in New Brunswick are required to wait in emergency departments alongside patients until they’re seen by other medical professionals.
“Our EMTs sit in that hallway their entire shift until the patient is taken from them. I don’t think people realize (those EMTs are) saying 80 per cent of their weeks are spent sitting in those hallways waiting, while they’d rather be out helping people and saving lives,” he said.
Spencer said despite all the messaging surrounding the challenges associated with wait times and emergency departments operating at capacity, experiencing it first-hand is “horrifying.”
“Depressing’s not the right word, it’s scary. I’m afraid for what my future brings, what health care looks like for my mother,” he said. “It’s always been a struggle finding doctors and getting into the ER and it’s just getting worse and worse.”
28-hour waits for paramedics
The Paramedic Association of New Brunswick said the situation did not happen overnight and paramedics have expanded their scope of practice to be able to better assess patients who call for an ambulance.
Chris Hood, the registrar for the association, said there are paramedics who’ve waited the duration of multiple shifts – up to 28 hours in some instances – to have a patient taken out of their care into the care of hospital staff.
“It is not unheard of for a paramedic, at the end of their shift, to be replaced by somebody at the hospital (while waiting with a patient), and then they’ll come back in for their next shift twelve hours later and go back to that hospital,” he said. “It’s like getting into overdraft in your personal bank account. Eventually you’re in the overdraft all the time. Payday comes. You get out of overdraft for the day, (then) you’re back in the overdraft. And now we have 12 ambulances sitting at the emergency room at all these hospitals.”
Hood said he doesn’t think the current setup can sustain itself in the long term.
“If you put a big incident on top of that, the system would collapse,” he said.
Hood said the increasing workload and stress is beginning to drive dozens of paramedics out of the province.
“We just finished our registration season and right now there are 121 less paramedics in the province today than there were on December 31st, so, they’re going somewhere,” he said.
The New Brunswick Medical Society (NBMS), an association that represents more than 2,000 physicians, said the overcrowding and excessive wait times on display in emergency departments throughout the province are creating a “high-risk environment for all involved.”
“The NBMS shares the frustrations of patients unable to access timely care and the health-care providers who are working tirelessly to ensure the sickest patients are admitted and treated as quickly as possible,” the group said in an emailed statement on Wednesday.
“Things are not getting better. Family physicians across the province are calling for an immediate investment in order to stabilize their practices.”
NBMS went on to affirm the group’s commitment to working with New Brunswick’s provincial government to implement improvements to the province’s healthcare system.
“We need to do so with a sense of urgency,” the statement read.
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