Amid fears health system is buckling, Toronto hospitals to issue alerts about overcrowded ERs

Amid signs of a growing crisis in the province's health-care system, an alert went out Thursday that the emergency department at Toronto General Hospital was at capacity — and that doctors should send their patients elsewhere.

The University Health Network (UHN) sent out the alert urging that patients be sent to other emergency rooms and specialty clinics, or that they be sent home if possible. 

Erin O'Connor, UHN's deputy medical director of emergency departments, told CBC Toronto this kind of alert has been used before for intensive care units, but will now be used to report on the situation in emergency departments at the network's hospitals. 

"The intent is really to give everyone else in the organization situational awareness about what's happening in the emergency department," O'Connor said Friday.

"There were patients waiting on EMS stretchers with our paramedic colleagues that we weren't actually able to move," she added.

Emergency beds were already full with patients who should have been moved to other departments, O'Connor said. The problem was, those other departments were also full, leaving no beds available to new emergency patients. 

Emergency departments across the province have been facing capacity issues for months, partly due to staff shortages. Earlier this week, Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children reported wait times of up to 12 hours due to unseasonably high patient volumes.

Experts say these ongoing problems are getting worse and they're concerned about the strain on the health-care system moving into the winter months with flu season, a possible surge in COVID-19 cases and other respiratory illnesses potentially overwhelming hospitals. 

"This is sort of the canary in the mine shaft," said Natalie Mehra, executive director of the Ontario Health Coalition, a network of community organizations that aims to advocate for and protect the province's health-care system.

"If it's bad like this in October, when we get into November, December, January … I think everyone is really, really alarmed at what is going to happen," she said. 

"How are we going to hold it together?" 

All areas of health care are facing the same capacity problems and staff shortages, which in turn, backs patients up into emergency departments, she told CBC Toronto. 

"You go to an emergency department and you're waiting ... 20 to 30 hours for admission to a bed in a brightly lit hallway with no privacy," Mehra said.

"It's horrible."