An elderly patient was shuffled from hospital to hospital this week, finding a lack of beds at one hospital and a lack of doctors at another.

The case may be shocking, but it's not surprising to seniors advocate Ian MacDonald.

“Our aging Nova Scotians are not getting the health care they deserve when they need it,” MacDonald says.

MacDonald wants a provincial strategy for seniors’ health care.

“This isn't  just about older Nova Scotians. It's about the younger ones too because whatever gets fixed now will be fixed when we arrive,” he says.

Kevin Chapman of Doctors Nova Scotia says hospital staff are dealing with capacity issues every day.

“The sort of new normal is overcrowding in hospitals and I don't think it's restricted to the (Halifax Infirmary). It's across the country,” Chapman says. “

“Any challenge in one part, whether it’s a challenge in moving folks into a long term care bed, or a challenge in having folks not have a family physician and going to the emergency department, impacts the flow-through of the acute care hospitals.”

That used to be called code census: when beds all through the hospital are full, and emergency beds fill up with patients who've been admitted.

In March, the NSGEU released a report called code critical. It said code census was called 23 times in 31 days in January. That meant staff would double up patients to make space. But code census hasn't been called since May.

“We realized that it's a challenge for us each day to meet our capacity and we looked at it and decided that we probably needed to be a little bit more proactive,” says Peter MacDougall, health services director of the Nova Scotia Health Authority.

MacDougall says improvements are being made at the infirmary, but the issue is complex. Patients who are healthy enough to be released from hospital often can't be because there's no long-term care placement for them.

There are currently more than 1,000 people on nursing home wait lists in Nova Scotia.

“We do not have enough beds, be they acute care beds or long-term beds, we do not have enough investment.

The Department of Health refused to do an interview for this story.

With files from CTV Atlantic’s Sarah Ritchie.