QEII hospital in Halifax has emergency, surgical bed shortages
Portable, temporary beds will be added to floors to ease congestion
The Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences Centre in Halifax was forced to call a code census at 11 a.m. on Monday as it scrambled to find beds for emergency patients who needed to be admitted.
At the same time, it was forced to cancel three surgeries because of a bed shortage caused by a delay in discharging some medical and cardiology patients because of their conditions.
"Code census is a protocol to add more temporary beds in medicine units that can house [emergency patients] so portable beds are brought in where space allows," Health Authority spokesman Everton McLean told CBC News in an email.
"It gives a short expansion to our capacity to help with the bottleneck so that patients continue to flow through the system," he said.
McLean said the surgery cancellations are not directly related to the code census, but occurred at the same time.