Major challenge for local hospitals operating at capacity

TRURO - With local hospitals filled to capacity, a strike by acute care health workers couldn't come at a worse time, a spokesperson says.
"Absolutely, that has been a major concern for us," said Krista Wood, spokeswoman for the Colchester East Hants Health Authority, regarding efforts to relocate patients and implement other contingency measures in preparation for a planned strike by members of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE).
"We're trying to reduce services and scale back the number of beds that we have in our facility in order to prepare for this," she said. "Even without a strike happening, we're having a major challenge at this point in time... operating at or near capacity or beyond."
CUPE has set Jan. 18 as its strike deadline if a settlement cannot be reached before then. Should that occur, some 480 local health-care employees will take to the streets, which will mean a complete patient relocation and shutdown of services at the Lillian Fraser Memorial Hospital in Tatamagouche and severely reduced services in the Truro facility. Healthcare services at the East Hants Resource Centre will also be curtailed.
While overcrowding at the hospital is not necessarily new, the period leading up to and since the Christmas holidays has been "really, really challenging for staff and for patients coming into emerge and other areas," Wood said.
Part of that is because of the long-standing issue of patient beds being taken up by elderly citizens awaiting placement into long-term care facilities, which causes a "trickle effect" throughout the hospital, she said.
The in-patient capacity is such that up to five people at a time have been kept waiting overnight in stretchers in the emergency department because no beds are available upstairs.
And in a more rare move, some male patients have even been housed in the maternity ward because there are no beds
elsewhere.
"To have an adult male in that unit is quite rare," Wood said. "I know it's something they've really worked to avoid ... it absolutely is not ideal."
When crowding at facilities such as the Colchester Regional Hospital become "really, really challenging," Wood said, a system known as a variance can be requested from the province to try to speed up placements for patients awaiting relocation to long-term beds.
"And that variance has been in effect ... for about two weeks," Wood said. "And we've been trying to move people out but we haven't been having a lot of luck with that, unfortunately."
That is simply because there are few relocation options available.
In the meantime, hospital staff can only try to deal with the demand as best as possible, while realizing that patience and tempers are already getting short.
"It has created significant frustrations among people coming into emerge and things like that," Wood said, of the recent demand on services.