Manitoba's largest hospital struggling to provide care for most ill in 'unprecedented crisis': doctors
CBC
Manitoba's health-care system has been unable to fully staff medicine, trauma and surgery wards for months, but health-care workers say they're now facing a crisis, after the largest emergency room in the province ran out of room over the weekend.
On Tuesday, CBC News reported that a dozen severely ill patients were lined up on stretchers in an entrance hallway at Winnipeg's Health Sciences Centre Sunday night because of a lack of space inside.
"It does feel like we have reached an unprecedented crisis in our ability to provide that acute emergency care," Dr. Merril Pauls, an emergency physician at HSC who worked over the weekend, said Tuesday afternoon.
"Over this past weekend we've had incidences where we had two critically ill patients placed into one resuscitation bed, so literally double-bunking patients in the most acute areas of our department."
Pauls said there are disruptions to the normal process in place for dealing with people having strokes, and he's never seen the situation so bad.
"Their stroke is progressing — parts of their brain are continuing to die because we can't get that person into a hospital bed," he said.
Dr. Shawn Young, HSC's chief operating officer, said the hospital had a lot of very high acuity patients come in this weekend, particularly on Sunday.
"There was nowhere else for them to really go," he said. "These were patients that need HSC."
The space and resource issues appeared earlier in the weekend, too. The daughter of a senior said she saw workers "stretched thin" on Friday and Saturday.
"There was disarray," said the woman, whom CBC News isn't naming as she spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Her father broke his hip in a fall and suffered other injuries on Friday. An ambulance took him to HSC's emergency room that afternoon, where he was kept on a stretcher in the hallway for three hours before being moved into a room, his daughter said.
The woman said over the course of 24 hours with her father, there were several experiences she found troubling.
She asked for a cloth at one point to help clean some blood off her father but was told "we'll be lucky if we have any clean linen," she said.
There appeared to be several open beds in the ER but not enough staff to manage them, she said, and there also seemed to be an equipment shortage.
