Moncton doctor says patients in 'every nook and cranny' of hospital

An emergency room doctor at The Moncton Hospital is joining the call for a long-term solution to the overcrowding problem at hospitals across New Brunswick.

Dr. Serge Melanson says he is all too familiar with the "intolerable congestion" that John McGarry, the chief executive officer of the Horizon Health Network, tweeted about recently.

"The problem is that if a hospital is full ... we have to find room for them somewhere and the rooms that we give them are typically corridor beds on our floors," he said.

"We have them admitted for days, sometimes in our emergency departments and this leads to congestion throughout the hospital."

Melanson says it is time for the provincial government to have a conversation about the problem with the public and with health-care providers.

Long term, we need to find a better way to treat our frail elderly and our most disadvantaged citizens better than what we're treating them now because right now what we're doing is housing them inside hospitals.- Dr. Serge Melanson

"We all recognize that this is not what we want for our patients but unfortunately we've been asked to do this because there's no other solution available right now," Melanson said.

"Unfortunately, we've made decisions of canceling planned elective surgeries so ... we've needed to put these surgeries off because we don't have the physical space to put them in hospital once their surgery is completed."

At The Moncton Hospital, Melanson says short-term fixes such as putting patients in corridors or putting five patients in the middle of a room designed for four patients are being implemented but it still isn't enough.

"Beyond that we're looking at mixed-gender rooms, which means we're looking at actually having patients of different genders — men and women — in the same ward," he said.

"It's not something that we want, it's certainly something that we have a lot of difficulty accepting as a staff but the alternative is to basically turn people away which we do not do at any cost."

Permanent solution needed

Melanson agrees with Horizon Health's CEO that the overcrowding at his hospital has become a crisis and says the "human cost" of the congestion has so far been ignored in the conversation.

"Long term, we need to find a better way to treat our frail elderly and our most disadvantaged citizens better than what we're treating them now because right now what we're doing is housing them inside hospitals," he said.

"I think what we need to ask the citizens of the province is what are we prepared to pay for the services that we want?"

He says most days half of the beds in the emergency room of the hospital are occupied by admitted patients who should be elsewhere. This effectively shrinks the emergency department, which sees 56,000 patients every year, to half its size.

"We can't physically find the space to see people, we literally have filled every nook and cranny in the hospital and the department and people are stuck waiting until we can free up the space," he said.