Long waits for emergency room add stress to St. B patients, staff

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This article was published 11/08/2021 (1745 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

EVERY day, patients are waiting longer in the St. Boniface Hospital ER.

For more than 10 hours, Gary Firth sat in the Winnipeg emergency room. Intense pain rippled through his body, getting worse any time he stood up, as he waited for treatment to deal with complications from a previous surgery.

By the time it was his turn, “I was screaming with pain,” the city resident says.

It was too late in the day for him to get the care he needed — no specialists were available that Friday evening before the August long weekend. He was sent home with painkillers and told to return on the next business day.

The same thing happened when he returned three days later: another 10-hour wait in the ER with no food or water, surrounded by about 30 people all waiting to see a doctor. The area was overflowing with people, and Firth said he saw patients being triaged in the hallway after being brought in by ambulance.

“The atmosphere was very depressed,” he said. “People were biting their tongues, I think, and just hanging in there.”

Again, Firth was sent home and told to return the next day.

In total, he waited nearly 24 hours in the ER over the course of three separate visits before he received necessary treatment. He’s just one of the patients who’s recently had to endure long waits at the overrun emergency department.

Amid nursing shortages, a lack of hospital in-patient beds and an influx of pandemic patients, the wait at St. Boniface is getting worse.

“In the last couple weeks, it’s the worst I’ve seen in my career,” said ER physician Dr. Paul Doucet, who’s been practising for 34 years.

“We’re seeing (wait) times of 10, 12 hours routinely over the last couple of weeks.”

Two years ago, Doucet publicly raised concerns about the ER’s lack of capacity to treat critically ill patients, describing the situation as chaotic. The problem wasn’t caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, but it needs concrete action, he said.

Lack of in-patient beds means patients are sometimes waiting in the ER for days after they’ve been admitted to hospital because there’s nowhere else to put them, he said. There’s a shortage of space for new ER patients coming in, and a shortage of nurses to care for them.

“Because of the tremendous stress and difficulty of attempting to care for patients in hospital settings, especially in the emergency department settings, many nurses have decided to leave because they just don’t find that their working conditions are manageable or sustainable,” Doucet said.

The vacancy rate for ER nurses at St. Boniface Hospital was around 26 per cent in June, according to the most recent data provided to the Manitoba Nurses Union from the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority, a union spokesperson said.

There were six patients waiting to see Doucet when his shift started at 7:30 a.m. Tuesday. All of them had waited 13-15 hours.

“It’s disappointing, and it’s just further eroding patient confidence in the health-care system and eroding staff morale. It makes it increasingly difficult to hire and keep staff with present working conditions,” he said.

“It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody that we’re in this type of crisis, because we’re intermittently in and out of crisis frequently, and the underlying causes aren’t being addressed.”

In a statement, the WRHA acknowledged the loss of some ER nurses, and said patient volumes have been increasing recently — even as some long-term COVID-19 patients remain in hospital, putting strain on the system’s ability to admit newcomers.

The WRHA has been using agency nurses and overtime to try to fill staffing gaps, with some nurse educators stepping in for shifts.

After his ordeal, Firth said he didn’t blame health-care staff, but he was left disillusioned. He’d already experienced an extended wait for prostate cancer surgery earlier this year.

“My message to people in Manitoba is: don’t get sick and don’t go to the hospital, because I have no faith in the system anymore.”

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @thatkatiemay