David Farley woke up Monday morning feeling ill.
The 75-year-old member of the Pugwash Village Commission thought it was a chest infection.
He first called the North Cumberland Memorial Hospital to make sure its emergency department was open before heading in.
“They advised me it would be reopened on Wednesday,” said Farley. “They said to call the hospitals in Springhill and Tatamagouche to see if their emergency rooms were open and failing that, Amherst.”
The emergency departments in the rural hospitals in Springhill, Parrsboro and Tatamagouche were closed all last week during daytime hours becausethere weren’t any doctors available. This week,Pugwash’s emergency department will be closed during the day for all but four
hours on Wednesday, and the emergency department in Springhill will be open on Tuesday and Friday, according to notices on the Nova Scotia Health Authority’s website.
When those emergency departments are closed, people head to the Cumberland Regional Health Care Centre outside Amherst. And that hospital’s emergency department wasn’t designed to be
large enough to serve all of Cumberland County.“We built our emergency room too small — it can’t be a regional hospital for 34,000 people and only have 11 beds (in the emergency room),” Dr. Brian Ferguson, who has worked as a doctor in Amherst for 31 years, told The Chronicle Herald recently.
“I sat on the committee that designed that emergency room, and at the time, lobbied for some of the smaller emergency rooms to be closed so that we could have a larger one. I was told that would be political suicide.”
The smaller hospitals are defined as collaborative emergency centres. So while doctors weren’t available during daytime hours, a registered nurse was.
During the night they are open with a registered nurse and a paramedic who have access to a doctor from elsewhere in the province.
“Recruitment for emergency department physicians and for family physicians who can work in emergency departments is ongoing,” said authority spokeswoman Kristen Lipscombe in a written response.
“We know that when community hospital emergency departments are temporarily closed it puts pressure on the regional emergency department. Our emergency department team works very hard to provide care and we know it can be frustrating for everyone — physicians, nursing staff and patients — when patient volumes are high and the emergency department is busy.
Our people are doing the best they can to assess, treat and discharge patients who don’t need admission, and to keep patient flow going in emergency departments.”
Two weeks ago, Cumberland North MLA Elizabeth Smith-McCrossin held a community meeting in Pugwash that was attended by representatives from the health authority.
“The community has a lot of concerns,” said Smith-McCrossin. “My recommendation would be, immediately, that they add enough funding to put another physician at the regional hospital even if for four to six hours a day during their busy hours. When the rural hospitals are closed it does put too much pressure on the regional hospital.”
For his part, Farley said he will wait until the appointment he was able to get for Tuesday at the clinic with a nurse practitioner to see about his suspected chest infection.
“So I was lucky,” said Farley.
