Officials with St. Thomas Elgin General Hospital say they’re bracing for a tough winter as staffing shortages and high occupancy rates, including rising numbers of COVID-19 patients, put continued pressure on the local health-care system.
With a looming influenza season, the hospital said Thursday that the lack of available beds and the lengthy emergency department wait times it has been experiencing, likely won’t subside soon, and could worsen through the winter.
As a result, the hospital is urging patients to seek alternate options for non-urgent needs, such as a family doctor, walk-in clinic, or urgent care centre. It’s also recommending that, in order to mitigate the risk of respiratory infection, people wear masks indoors and keep their immunizations current.
“We’ve been experiencing overcapacity and some increased volume for a while now, but certainly we’ve reached that point where our COVID numbers are quite high, and we had no beds available by the end of the day yesterday,” said Karen Davies, the hospital’s president and CEO, on Thursday.
“I say that knowing that it’s a fluid situation. We’re always moving patients in and out and doing what we can to accommodate, but certainly it’s been more difficult with the high number of alternate level of care (ALC) patients, and then the high number of people presenting and requiring admission through the emergency department.”
Davies says there is a lack of available patient beds in units throughout the hospital, including in the medical surgical unit, which has a baseline bed number of 65. As of Thursday, 88 patients were in the unit, she says.
“We added 22 beds to that unit at the beginning of the pandemic, and certainly ahead of the pandemic, we were frequently using more than the 65 beds that we had as a baseline,” Davies said.
“We have six paediatric patient beds. They’re full as well. Our adult ICU is full at 14 patients, and our four-bed neonatal intensive care unit is also full … Mental health unit. It’s full as well. There’s 15 beds there. And then we have 33 beds for complex and continuing care.”
The lack of beds means patients coming to the emergency department have to wait there for one to open, leading to lengthy wait times and added ER pressures.
In addition, because of the pandemic, more patients are arriving at the hospital with more acute and complex care needs, resulting in longer admittance, officials say.
Roughly 70 years, Davies says the age of the hospital limits their ability to add additional beds or open up new space.
“The 22 beds we added are the most that we can add here. It’s a constant daily struggle to make sure that patient movement is happening,” she said.
Hospitals across the province have been grappling for months with significant patient wait times, ER closures, large surgical backlogs, and staff and resource shortages as health-care workers retire, flee the profession, or move stateside after years of frozen public sector wages under Bill 124 and stress brought by the COVID pandemic.
STEGH itself lost a number of health-care providers through the pandemic, and continues to as more choose to retire from the profession, Davies says.
On top of that, a high number of hospital staff are currently off as a result of illnesses, she said.
“Working in health care is really difficult right now,” she said. “We’re all concerned about health-care workers staying in the field, staying in our hospitals, and we know that we’re getting a lot of competition, particularly from the United States and Western Canada right now in recruiting nurses.”
Hospital resources are also being impacted by a high number of alternate level of care (ALC) patients — patients waiting to be repatriated to an available long-term care facility or hospital closer to their home. As of Thursday, at least 30 such patients were occupying beds at the hospital.
“We have medical and surgical units, the entire unit, that is smaller than that number,” Davies said.
Other Ontario hospitals, including London Health Sciences Centre, are also experiencing capacity challenges as ALC patients wait to be relocated.
A controversial law which took effect last month, Bill 7, allows hospitals to send those patients to homes up to 70 kilometres away in southern Ontario. As of Nov. 20, hospitals will also be able to charge patients $400 per day if they refuse to move.
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.
“We look forward to continuing to work with all partners, including Ontario Health and the 140 public hospital corporations, the regulatory colleges, and health sector unions, to address any challenges and keep Ontario open,” Ministry of Health spokesperson Hannah Jensen told Global News last week.
The province is also investing more than $5 billion in support of the health-care system, and is “building and improving dozens of hospitals” across Ontario, she said.
— With files from The Canadian Press
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