Winnipeg doctors working in city hospitals say patient wait times are some of the worst they’ve seen in their careers and fear many are not getting the type of care they deserve.
While COVID-19 hospitalization and intensive care admissions have dropped off, doctors said there is still a critical shortage of beds, staff and nurses, which is exacerbating wait times and leaving many receiving less than optimal care.
“I’ve been working at St. Boniface Hospital for over 34 years in the emergency department and it’s never been as difficult to see patients as it has the last few weeks,” Dr. Paul Doucet told Global News. “I’ve seen wait times of 16 and 17 hours.”
Doucet said when he started his shift one day last week, there were already six patients waiting to be seen that had been waiting an average of 14 hours.
“That’s unprecedented,” he said.
The emergency physician said the long wait times and staffing shortage is creating dangerous situations for staff and patients.
“We don’t have the capacity within the system to allow timely care for our patients and it’s exceedingly frustrating.”
Doucet’s comments come on the heels of a patient at St. Boniface Hospital going into cardiac arrest last Tuesday evening after waiting approximately four hours for care.
The man came by ambulance and was lying on a stretcher after being triaged when he went into cardiac arrest. Emergency staff had to resuscitate him in the middle of the hallway in front of other patients.
“Our nursing staff is put in the position continuously to fail their patients because of a systemic problem with lack of capacity,” Doucet said.
While emergency departments are feeling the crunch, physicians said it highlights a larger problem within the hospital as a whole.
“The system remains remarkably fragile,” intensivist Dr. Anand Kumar said. “There’s no question I’m seeing evidence of major stress throughout the hospital, including the emergency room.”
While Kumar spends the majority of his days in the intensive care unit at Health Sciences Centre, he said it’s clear the hospitals in Winnipeg are struggling.
“In my opinion, they’re not operating in the optimal way that they could be.”
Staff are exhausted and morale is low, he said.
“It’s a slow deterioration and I don’t think there’s any question that we’ve seen slow deterioration in terms of the ability of the medical system to respond to the demands on it,” he said. “People are tired, people are quitting and people are at their limit in terms of pitching in to kind of go the extra mile.”
While emergency room wait times are often one of the most visible indicators of stress on the health-care system for patients, Shared Health chief nursing officer Lanette Siragusa said it signals a bigger issue for health officials.
“Emergency is not the problem, quite honestly,” Siragusa told Global News.
“Emergency is like the canary in the coal mine.”
Both St. Boniface and Health Sciences Centre are dealing with significant nursing shortages but Siragusa said the ER often has a bottleneck problem trying to get patients admitted who need beds in other areas of the hospital.
“It’s a process issue and there’s not really one silver bullet that fixes it, but it is something that we definitely have to work together as a system to respond and support our emergency departments,” she said.
She said it is not just a one-unit or one-hospital problem but instead one that is systemic.
“The problem is the flow into the inpatient beds up in the hospitals. There’s the inpatient beds and also the outflow out of the hospital.”
Siragusa said it was an issue pre-COVID-19 that was being worked on but was pushed to the back burner while dealing with the virus.
“We were working on access block and then we all got diverted with COVID and the pandemic. So we need to go back to the core efforts of making sure that there’s patient flow, making sure people are in the right place to get the care they need,” she said.