A woman from the Halifax area says she was disappointed there wasn’t a hospital bed for her to be cared for during a recent visit.
Deidre MacPherson said on Friday she developed breathing complications at her Dartmouth home on Feb. 23.
She said she was told while in an ambulance that there wasn’t enough space at Dartmouth General Hospital, so she was taken to Cobequid Community Health Centre.
There, after waiting four hours to be checked out, a physician said she had pneumonia in both lungs, MacPherson said, but there was no space for her, so she would have to go to another hospital.
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MacPherson, who was also quoted in a Nova Scotia NDP news release, decided to recover in her home for a couple of weeks under the care of one her parents, a retired nurse.
“I’m lucky that I have family that can care for me, but I worry about other Nova Scotians who don’t have that option. What would happen to them?” she said.
“All over Nova Scotia, we have hospitals where patients are being looked after in corridors, in hallways, and outside the pop machine, and there’s a reason for this. The reason is that for five years, the government hasn’t opened a single nursing home bed, and we have about a fifth of the beds in the hospitals in our province that are filled at the moment with people who aren’t hospital patients there,” Nova Scotia NDP Leader Gary Burrill said in an interview.
There are many people going to emergency rooms because they don’t have a family doctor, he added.
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Nova Scotia Health Authority spokesperson Kristen Lipscombe said in an email that the organization doesn’t speak on specific cases because of privacy laws.
“Because overcrowding is a complex system issue, we are engaging stakeholders from all disciplines and departments to find solutions. We have seen collaborative solutions that have helped to mitigate the impact of the increasing demand on resources,” she said.
“These solutions include: embedding internal medicine staff in the emergency department; increasing bed capacity in medicine; hospitalists increasing their bed capacity; and making best use of available space.”
The organization is working on a new overcapacity policy, Lipscombe said.
“We have also started a process of multiple bed rounds each day at both the Halifax Infirmary and Victoria General site of the QEII Health Sciences Centre in Halifax. Unit managers and charge nurses, together with the bed manager, meet to discuss capacity in both the emergency department and inpatient units and then identify proactive actions needed to address patient flow across the sites.”
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