Long wait times for non-urgent matters reported at London Children’s Hospital ER

The emergency department at London’s Children’s Hospital is not immune to the long wait times that have been seen at hospitals across Ontario, including at London Health Sciences Centre’s adult emergency department.

In a social media post on Wednesday, officials with LHSC advised parents and guardians to pack their patience if bringing their child to the emerg at Children’s for a non-urgent matter.

“Our ED at Children’s Hospital is experiencing higher than normal volumes. We anticipate wait times of 5+ hours for non-urgent concerns,” the post, tweeted around 3:30 p.m., read.

“Please come prepared to wait. Pack a snack, water, etc. In a medical emergency, dial 911 or go to an Emergency Dept.”

The alert comes after a similar one last week involving LHSC’s adult department, where wait times of more than 15 hours for non-urgent health matters were reported, including a spike which exceeded the 20 hour mark. Last week’s alert followed a similar one issued on Oct. 7.

Earlier this month, the head of LHSC’s pediatric emergency department at Children’s, Dr. Rod Lim, told Global News that the upcoming cold and flu season was expected to be a significant challenge for the health-care system, with children more susceptible to catching viruses.

“There is a phenomenon that when parents send their children to school for the first time, they’re sick for the whole year because they haven’t been exposed to viruses either in their life or ahead of time,” he said.

“But we know that children have basically been sheltered for two to two and a half years now, so the susceptibility of the population is very high and the mixing is almost back to pre-pandemic levels. So we do anticipate that this will be quite a challenging season.”

Lim noted that respiratory viruses have not been keeping with historic time trends, bringing uncertainty about when the cold and flu season would start, and whether it may arrive as other viruses are in circulation, be it COVID-19 or RSV, respiratory syncytial virus.

Quebec has reported soaring rates of RSV, with positivity rates of around 15 per cent reported in Montreal and Quebec City, and 13 per cent provincewide.

Canada-wide figures show a positivity rate of two per cent in Ontario and 3.4 in Atlantic Canada. The lowest rates were 1.4 per cent in British Columbia, one per cent on the Prairies and two per cent in the Territories. Local R

RSV is common among children, and 90 per cent will have had an RSV infection by the age of two, Dr. Jesse Papenburg, pediatric infectious disease specialist at Montreal Children’s Hospital, told the Canadian Press this week. Only a small percentage of cases lead to hospitalization.

LHSC, like other hospitals across the country, has been grappling with human resource challenges brought on by retirements, people leaving the profession following COVID-19, and frustration over wages frozen by Bill 124, which capped public sector salary increases at one per cent per year for three years.

In September, roughly 540 vacant nursing positions were up for grabs at LHSC.

The organization has also had challenges discharging patients, including alternate-level-of-care patients waiting to be repatriated to long-term care or a hospital near their home, Dr. Christine MacDonald, city-wide chief of LHSC’s Department of Emergency Medicine, told Global News this month.

The province says it plans to add up to 6,000 nurses and PSWs, with the goal of freeing hospital beds and expanding models of care to avoid unnecessary ER visits, and has added more than 3,500 new critical care, acute, and post-acute hospital beds, as well as more than 11,700 health-care workers.

Ontario’s health minister has also directed the College of Nurses to move forward with regulatory changes to make it quicker for internationally-trained nurses to practice in the province.

— with files from The Canadian Press

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