A Nova Scotia woman says her ailing mother has been shuffled from hospital to hospital due to a lack of beds and doctors.

Kathy Garrison says her 84-year-old mother June MacLeod has been to four hospitals since Saturday after being diagnosed with bacterial pneumonia.

“I think that the health system is really failing,” Garrison says.

MacLeod was first taken to the Cobequid Health Centre in Lower Sackville Saturday night. She needed to be admitted, so she was sent by ambulance to the Halifax Infirmary.

Garrison says she waited for six hours in an emergency room hallway.

“The paramedics were looking after her and there was many paramedics looking after a lot of people,” she says.

MacLeod stayed in an emergency bed Sunday. By Monday, she was one of 21 people admitted to the infirmary who couldn't get a hospital bed.

Rather than keep her in emergency, staff opted to send her to Twin Oaks Memorial Hospital in Musquodoboit Harbour.

“That facility has nurses and they are great. They're taking care of her the best that they can,” Garrison says.

But there are no doctors on site between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. Garrison says her mother's condition deteriorated Tuesday night.

“She has COPD, she has heart problems and she has bacterial pneumonia. I think their choices of moving somebody that sick as opposed to a healthier, 20, 30-year-old person, I think was a very bad decision,” she says

Macleod was moved yet again on Thursday to the Dartmouth General.

The Nova Scotia Health Authority says the decision to move patients to other hospitals is complex.

“It's unfortunate that that would happen to somebody, definitely,” says Peter MacDougall, director of health services at the Halifax Infirmary. “The team does sit and have a discussion around what is the right place, or where is the right place, what the care needs are. So those decisions are not made lightly.”

The family says they've been in touch with their MLA, Brendan Maguire. He says it's gone all the way to the assistant to the health minister, who agreed that what happened to June MacLeod made no sense.

The health minister did not grant CTV News an interview on the matter on Thursday.

With files from CTV Atlantic’s Sarah Ritchie.