ER capacity issues will continue until space, staffing addressed, hospital administrator says

The pressure on the emergency department at Charlottetown's Queen Elizabeth Hospital eased somewhat Monday after an extremely busy weekend. 

Wait times were so long Saturday — up to 15 hours for some patients — that Health P.E.I. sent out a news release to warn the public. 

Hospital officials said it was a combination of being short staffed and busier than usual with the ER in Montague closed early.

The 245 acute care beds at the QEH were all occupied, leaving 15 ER patients admitted to hospital with nowhere to go. 

We haven't been able to increase the number of beds, just because we don't have the volume of staff to do that.— Terry Campbell, administrator

In the last few years, that's been the main reason for growing ER wait times at the QEH, as well as Summerside's Prince County Hospital. 

The hospitals are full, so admitted patients end up trapped in the ER, taking up stretchers and care spaces. 

Without more doctors, nurses and space, backups in the ER will continue, said QEH administrator Terry Campbell. 

"We're trying to run as many beds in the facility that we have staffing for. So, we haven't been able to increase the number of beds, just because we don't have the volume of staff to do that."

Dr. Steven MacNeill, an ER doctor at Prince County Hospital, said pre-pandemic, they'd typically have four admitted patients waiting in ER stretchers. Now, it's often 14, leaving just four or five stretchers for others. 

"Now we're seeing more and more shifts where it's not always the physician that's the bottleneck, it's sometimes the space," he said in an interview with CBC after a particularly challenging day at the ER 10 days ago.

"And the physicians are sitting waiting for a bed to be cleaned, or patients to be moved around, to try to get some stretcher space where we can get another patient in."

Transitioning space to patient care

MacNeill said the hospital is doing its best to continue to see patients, despite the backlog. He said the ER often becomes the "catch all" for patients who don't have access to a family doctor or when other departments are short.

"We've actually transitioned both our family rooms into patient care areas, so there's patients in there with stretchers," he said. 

"Our secondary triage space, it's supposed to be an overflow triage area is now a patient care area. The hallway between the triage area and coming into the department is now a patient care area, and we've got hallway beds and offload delay. And hallway stretchers are something that are brand new to us.  We've never had it in our history."

Campbell said the hospital was typically 91 per cent full five years ago. With a growing number of people living on P.E.I. and an aging population running into health issues, now it's often 99 per cent full.

He said the ERs will likely get busier and the wait times longer this summer, with thousands of tourists adding to the population. 

"We don't want to deter anyone, of course, but we do also want to let folks know what to expect."