A surge of patients at four Winnipeg hospital emergency rooms has prompted a decision to open dozens of temporary contingency beds to handle the load.
The Winnipeg Regional Health Authority says the Health Sciences Centre, St. Boniface, Seven Oaks and Grace hospitals have been seeing high patient loads for the past two weeks.
It says they’re backed up because of an increase in the number of people with respiratory illnesses and unusually long hospital stays for some patients.
Health authority CEO Réal Cloutier says 72 beds have been opened in existing units or spaces that can be used for patient care, but none in hallways.
The beds are being handled by nurses working overtime and Cloutier says there’s no question staff are facing additional pressure.
The Manitoba Nurses Union says the overtime is a concern and is not sustainable.
“New cases of influenza are declining but what we’re seeing is a lot of respiratory type illnesses,” said Cloutier. “Certainly people are sicker in the hospitals and we’re having challenges around discharges.”
Health officials said the Health Sciences Centre emergency room was so busy on Tuesday that patients who would have been arriving by ambulance were sent elsewhere in advance. The ER was only accepting ambulance patients with certain health conditions.
Ashern, Man., resident Diane Price arrived in the HSC emergency room last weekend with her husband, who has lung cancer and was diagnosed at the hospital with pneumonia.
Price said he had to wait three hours before being admitted to the ER, where he waited an additional 26 hours to be moved to a hospital bed.
“I was here until midnight and every chair was full in the ER,” said Price. “The nurses in that ER are just overrun. They’re just scrambling to help everybody. It’s a backlog and it’s plugged right up.”
The Manitoba government has previously said it plans to close the emergency rooms at the Seven Oaks and Concordia hospitals this summer as part of an ongoing health-care consolidation plan.
Cloutier said he’s confident that once ER consolidation is complete, the health-care system will be equipped to handle similar situations in the future.
“The plan is still intact … there’s strong confidence that the plan is appropriate,” he said.