The emergency room at the Anna Laberge Hospital in Chateauguay is treating three times more the number of patients than it normally handles — meaning it’s almost 200 per cent over capacity.
It’s a similar situation at the Suroit Hospital in Valleyfield.
“The occupation rate at the emergency is a concern to us, we won’t lie. And we’re working on it,” Maryse Bégin, the spokesperson for the health and social services sector in the western part of the south shore, told Global News.
More beds are being ordered to try and bring the ERs’ critical overcrowding condition to a more manageable level.
“The winter season always brings extra traffic to the emergency, and second, we do have an aging and growing population,” Bégin said.
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The City of Vaudreuil-Dorion saw its population grow five times faster than the national average between 2006 and 2011.
It’s a major impetus behind the push to build a new hospital in Vaudreuil.
But where and when are questions that aren’t being clearly answered by the government.
The health minister wasn’t available to comment on Thursday.
And the public safety minister swept the issue aside by blaming past administrations for current overcrowding problems.
“People in Montéregie and Montreal are really fed up with that wait and all problems in the hospitals because of the negligence of the former governments,” Public Security Minister Geneviève Guilbault told Global News in Quebec City.
Still, Bégin remains confident the new hospital will be built as promised by 2026.
But for now, she says, hospital staff are trying to get the overcrowding problems out of critical care.