Posted on 01/25/2007 6:24:14 PM PST by buccaneer81
ER waits turn into three days
Article Tools Print By SHAWN BERRY berry.shawn@dailygleaner.com Published Thursday January 25th, 2007 Appeared on page A1
Some patients are spending up to three days in the emergency room as the Dr. Everett Chalmers Regional Hospital deals with a bed shortage.
All 303 beds at the hospital are occupied and there were 17 patients in the ER on Wednesday night, said Geri Geldart, chief nursing officer.
"All throughout the month of January ... we had as many as 10 or 15 patients waiting for one, two and sometimes three days in the emergency department," she said.
While the hospital is already in need of at least 10 more beds, the situation has been compounded by a slew of incidents.
They range from a nasty strain of norovirus to 27 patients who are in hospital awaiting a spot in a nursing home.
"A number of our beds are occupied by patients awaiting placement in a nursing home," she said at River Valley Health's board meeting Wednesday night.
"If that issue were resolved in terms of capacity for nursing-home patients, that would certainly ease a lot of the pressure that we're feeling."
Adding beds isn't the quick solution some might think it to be, Geldart said.
Since last fall, the hospital has added 10 beds by converting pediatric beds to medical-surgery beds. But adding even more means finding more funding and nurses.
"We're reasonably well-staffed in terms of our positions being full, but our ability to scale up and staff another 15 beds would be tough because we don't have the staff to fill those spots."
Twenty elective surgeries have been cancelled since Jan. 1.
Geldart also said the hospital is seeing more patients because of bed and hospital closures that have occurred in other areas of the health authority.
Meanwhile, John McGarry, CEO of River Valley Health, said word this region isn't getting a new heart-catheterization lab or becoming home of the province's lead trauma-care centre shouldn't be taken as a slight.
Plenty of attention was given to Moncton's call for a new cath lab during the last provincial election - a demand the new Liberal government has fulfilled.
And now there's debate in other corners of New Brunswick about whether a provincial trauma care centre should be based out of Moncton or Saint John. But McGarry said that doesn't diminish the Fredericton region's importance in the provincial health-care system.
"We've not been in the competition. We don't want to be in the competition - if you can call it that - and we're not less of a health authority because of that," McGarry said.
When it comes to the trauma centre, the Dr. Everett Chalmers Regional Hospital is out of the running because it doesn't have a neurosurgical program.
And with regard to a cath lab, McGarry said local patients are getting timely, proper treatment at the New Brunswick Heart Centre cath lab in Saint John.
Replicating services like a cath lab just for the sake of providing them locally isn't the right answer, he said.
It doesn't make sense that every health region in New Brunswick should compete for these much sought-after specialists, McGarry said.
"We have services in this province that are provided in other centres very appropriately because it takes many specialized people and specialized technology and we all know New Brunswick can't afford to duplicate and triplicate just because people would like to have it local."
McGarry said we need to recognize our place in a provincial system, adding Fredericton is home to the provincial tertiary neurological rehabilitation centre at the Stan Cassidy Centre for Rehabilitation, located beside the Chalmers hospital.
"We have the tertiary-centre for rehabilitation medicine. That is our specialty," he said.
"We are an exemplary region for primary care - we have a rural component, we are the centre of expertise for orthopaedics and restorative surgery with our major plastics and orthopaedics department.
"So we have enough accolades that we don't need to be searching for more."
I went to college up there. It's a farce. You can DIE waiting for treatment.
Get ready for more of this if Obama and Hitlery get in.
When Hillary and Osama bring CanadaCare to the US you can bet your bottom dollar that neither of them...or their families...friends....contributors....or biographers...will ever have to wait for 10 minutes in an ER.
Lines are for the little people.
It can happen here too - my f-i-l went to the hospital short of breath, cardiologist said he wasn't going home, and f-i-l spent the next 20 hours or so on a gurney waiting for a room and bypass surgery EVEN though m-i-l is a doctor herself. (Cardiologist made the right call on that one, by the way.)
In the U.S., all three of these cities would have a trauma care centre.
And so, in all liklihood, would Edmundston and Bathurst.
It simply wouldn't be an issue.
"It can happen here too "
Not the same. You FIL waited 20 hours for a major operation. Those folks waited 72 hours just to be seen by a doctor. Your FIL would probably have died.
Have you seen the recent stories about people dying in the UK because the ambulance drivers are on a mandatory coffee break.
" No Granny, No Problem."
You nailed it.
I suspect you are correct.
Large medical centers routinely hold patient for beds in their ER. There is no story here.
No, he got the room first and the operation a few days later. But you're right, he got competent medical care from the start even if they were overcrowded.
Wow! I'm impressed with your New Brunswick knowledge. I graduated High School in Woodstock and then went to MT A.
Three days? I think not.
Maybe I'm missing it but where in the article does it state that?
Illegal Aliens are clogging up the health care system. They've bankrupt California.
This is what government regulation does.
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