'Battlefield conditions': Halifax emergency department overcrowded, hospital sites overcapacity

Halifax -

Senior citizen Gary MacLeod says his most recent waits in the emergency department at the QEII Health Sciences Centre in Halifax were like being on a “battlefield.”

“It’s beneath human dignity, as far as I can tell,” he says.

Over the past few weeks, he’s been in the ER waiting room for a total of five days, each day waiting at least 10 hours to be seen, and sometimes leaving without being seen at all, only to have to come back the next day.

MacLeod says he saw many patients sleeping on dirty floors with no blankets, including the elderly. He says others were forced to stand, with chairs already full. He was appalled at the lack of nutritious food available for those waiting hours on end, and with the lack of sanitization.

“If we have to wait, endure, long periods of time in 'battlefield conditions', there's things that they can do,” he says.

MacLeod wrote a letter to hospital administrators and provincial health officials describing conditions as “disgusting and appalling.”

“This ER is not designed to wait long periods of time in such conditions,” he says. “No wonder people are walking out.”

He’d like to see cots, blankets, and basic care from staff provided to those who are waiting.

“The care beyond the glass, it doesn’t reflect what going on in that waiting room,” he says. “That’s pre-care, and that’s the ‘welcome mat’ to our health care system.”

“We have, at times, had to eliminate the ability of patients to present with their loved ones, we've had to keep them out of the waiting room because our waiting rooms are so crowded,” admits Dr. Mary-Lynn Watson, the interim medical site lead and emergency physician at the QEII.

Dr. Watson says there has been a recent occasion when a hospital site ran out of warm blankets for patients.

She says what’s happening is surge capacity collapse, “the ability of a system, to be able to accept unexpected visits, and be able to provide acute care for those patients, without stressing the rest of the system,” she adds.

That means being able to treat a sudden influx of patients quickly and safely, whether from a bad vehicle crash or an influenza outbreak.

Dr. Watson says normally, a hospital would operate at 85 per cent capacity to allow for any unexpected surge in cases, but the QEII Health Sciences sites are now at 103 per cent.

She says all 44 emergency department beds are currently full, and the wait time for a patient triaged as an acuity level 2, such as those with chest pain or severe abdominal pain, is presently three to four hours. The national standard, which she says has “never been achieved,” is 30 minutes.

“And patients are at risk, the longer they wait to be seen, the higher the potential of them developing something that is more challenging than what they came in with,” she says.

Dr. Watson says pandemic shutdowns provided the health-care system with a “cushion,” after many surgeries were cancelled, and fewer patients were coming in overall.

She says the current crisis has been brewing for a long time, brought to a head under the current lack of access to family doctors, post-pandemic staff shortages and surgery backlogs, and patients coming in sicker than before.

Wednesday, at the Nova Scotia legislature, Health Minister Michelle Thompson insisted the situation was being managed.

“Wherever possible, we direct people to the front lines, we work with partners across the system to see how we can support different opportunities to deliver care,” says Thompson.

But the leader of the NDP questioned whether any concrete steps are being taken.

“There are ways to take decisive action,” says Claudia Chender. “We haven't seen it and people are simply not getting access to the health care they need. It’s very, very scary.”

Dr. Watson wants patients to get the care they need.

“Patients need to let us know if their condition changes, they need to make sure that they do seek care,” she says. “We also ask that as far as health-care workers go, we are all trying to do our best in a system that is significantly overwhelmed.”