A newborn with a fever waited five hours to be seen by an emergency physician near Toronto.
Patients were surrounded by garbage and urine as they waited 18 to 20 hours for care at a hospital in Fredericton.
And in Alberta, Red Deer’s long-beleaguered hospital was forced to hang tarps to create makeshift treatment spaces.
Those headlines come from different hospitals and different provinces. But they all point to the same grim problem: Emergency rooms are overflowing while an array of respiratory illnesses — COVID-19 included — keep circulating. And it’s happening against a backdrop of behind-the-scenes backlogs that turn front-line ERs into dangerous choke points.
The numbers are staggering. More than 10,000 people are in hospital at once across B.C., the most the province has ever seen, while Quebec grapples with the highest level of patients in its emergency rooms in five years.
In Ottawa, the Queensway Carleton Hospital recently said it was operating at 115 per cent occupancy. By midweek, most Montreal emergency rooms were above full capacity, with some operating at roughly 200 per cent.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The usual slate of viral threats, from influenza to respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, make this time of year particularly challenging for hospitals thanks to the ongoing influx of sick patients.
But pointing a finger at the current issues — sick patients, staff shortages, surgery backlogs, and clogged ERs — doesn’t capture the deeper problem plaguing Canadian hospitals.
1 reason wait times are excessive," Dr. Paul Ratana, the medical director for the emergency department at Winnipeg’s St. Boniface Hospital, said at a provincial press conference earlier this week.
Those patients were all essentially “stuck in hospital, with nowhere to go,” said study author Aaron Jones, an assistant professor in the department of health research methods, evidence and impact at McMaster University in Hamilton and an adjunct scientist with Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences.
“We are facing a primary care crisis in this country, and we urgently need to find solutions,” wrote Dr. Kathleen Ross, president of the Canadian Medical Association, a national physician advocacy group, in a statement this week.
Last fall, his association of ER doctors met with provincial and territorial health ministers to discuss how they could team up at a national forum this spring to find fixes for the overcrowding in emergency rooms.
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