The temporary unit at a Fredericton hospital that was described as a “garage with curtains” on social media will no longer be used to admit patients by the end of March, according to Horizon Health Network.
The Medical Transition Unit was created in 2024 in response to chronic overcapacity at the Dr. Everett Chalmers Regional Hospital and was located in a former ambulance bay.
It was used for patients admitted through the emergency department while waiting to be transferred to inpatient beds.
However, the unit had no running water and and patients were separated by tattered curtains, photos show.
“Putting a patient in an ambulance bay is not care. That is actually sweeping the problem off to the side without actually dealing with it,” New Brunswick Nurses Union president, Paula Doucet, told Global News on Jan. 8.
Horizon announced this week that several services, including electrodiagnostic and respiratory therapy, will be moved to another location in the community and other areas of the hospital by March 31. Other clinics will be shifted within the hospital, creating 13 new acute spaces for patients.
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The former ambulance bay space will then be renovated to create new clinical care spaces and include bathrooms, sinks, and other infrastructure.
“We felt that now was the appropriate time for us to really unveil this plan and give the public the reassurance firstly that we’re working on these changes,” said Margaret Melanson, Horizon’s president and CEO.
Earlier this month, Katarina Lekborg wrote an open letter to Premier Susan Holt to bring attention to what she called the “garage with curtains” at the hospital.
Lekborg described how her 88-year-old grandmother was laying on a stretcher in the unit, which had no running water.
“This environment is unsafe, unethical, and unhygienic. It places patients at heightened risk of infection, injury, and cognitive decline. It is disorienting to a healthy person, let alone someone in delirium,” she wrote.
On Jan. 8, Holt called the situation “terrible” and said she was in touch with the family.
Melanson admitted to reporters on Tuesday the unit isn’t ideal.
“This was not a space that was providing the quality of care that we wanted to provide to our patients and families. And we absolutely understood that this was a temporary measure to be taken while we were dealing firstly with severe overcapacity and looking at solutions that could be undertaken,” she said.
“That’s the circumstance that we have faced and and this is why the planning started almost immediately toward some of these other solutions that we know we need to undertake.”
However, Melanson said the announced changes were not in direct response to Lekborg’s open letter.
“We certainly do not arrive upon these community locations overnight, so I can certainly verify for you this planning was well underway,” she said.
Dr. Yogi Sehhal, an ER doctor in Fredericton who has spoken out about the overcapacity issues at the hospital, said the announced changes “doesn’t solve the problem.”
“Chalmers is too small for its purpose, so things need to be reworked to squeeze whatever we can out of the space we have,” he told Global News in a statement.
“The hospital cannot solve primary care, long-term care and social services and still provide its primary mission.”
Melanson stressed that overcapacity pressures have not eased and there is no indication that will change.
“We certainly do not have any plans for any other converted ambulance bays at this time. I will say, though, that these severe overcapacity pressures have (pushed) us toward having more and more patients that are being housed in areas that are not of the highest quality,” she said.
“And so we have patients that are within hallways, within waiting rooms, within family rooms and other locations. None of these locations is ideal or provides the quality of care that we want to have available to our seniors.”
She said the “only realistic plan” now is to look at moving services externally that are not required in the hospital to “allow us additional space.”
— with a file from Johnny James
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