SASKATOON – According to a registered nurse, there was no room in the emergency room at Royal University Hospital (RUH) in Saskatoon on Jan. 1. As a result, patients had to wait in ambulances.
The Saskatoon Health Region (SHR) said Tuesday it does have a backlog in the emergency room and very frequently a patient is waiting with an EMS team.
A number of concerns were brought up by the Saskatchewan NDP on Tuesday. It says the nurse, who does not want to be named, has had enough of overcrowding, short staffing and poor infrastructure.
The Opposition blames Lean, an evaluation process meant to reduce health care costs.
“The hours of endless training that provide very little benefit, that’s part of the answer is insuring that we’re not spending those dollars in a way that isn’t bringing the results that we need,” said NDP Leader Cam Broten.
“It’s time to stop diverting millions of health-care dollars to the John Black version of Lean and put them back on the front lines of care.”
Meanwhile, SHR says the Lean is the solution.
“Lean in this world is helping us understand how we match our demand to the capacity that we are able to deliver,” Sandra Blevins, integrated services vice president at SHR.
“It’s making us understand the root cause of our issues and to really use the math and the science in managing our patient flow and that’s critical.”
READ MORE: Saskatoon Health Region dealing with system backlog
SHR continues to deal with overcapacity. The region anticipated 35 people to be discharged Tuesday but needed 47 beds at 8 a.m. As of Tuesday, 127 patients in the region were waiting for placement into long-term care.
“Our waits in emergency are very long and that is not what we want to see happening because essentially we are caring for those patients in the hallway of our emergency,” said Blevins.
“Why they’re waiting that long is those individuals have a very special need, they’re not critical care cause that flow continues to happen but they’re requiring likely an isolation, a very special room to go into to be cared for.”
The region’s target is to have everyone in emergency placed within five hours. The longest wait so far for one patient is 80 hours.
Typically, the week of Dec. 22 experiences a dip but that didn’t happen last month. SHR officials also say it had a 66 per cent increase in patient days in December over November.
The registered nurse says a broken water pipe at RUH caused a power outage and resulted in patients being transferred to City Hospital for surgeries.
According to SHR, no surgeries have been cancelled during overcapacity.
Blevins says the infrastructure issues that unnamed nurse pointed out occurred but not all on Jan. 1. She added the region is challenged with infrastructure issues every day and all are dealt with.
Blevins said the region’s hospitals continue to run at overcapacity, even reaching all-time highs this past week. SHR is striving to keep quality of care up, even as many staff are sick and others are working overtime at a premium.
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