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A shortage of hospital staff has led to the closure of rural hospitals and at least three people who sought emergency care have died in the past year.
Publication date:
July 22, 2022 • 18 hours ago • 4 minutes read • 47 comments The emergency entrance at Lions Gate Hospital in North Vancouver. Photo by NICK PROCAILLO /PNG
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Health Minister Adrian Dix should resign or be fired, the British Columbia Liberals said, in light of the death of a patient who spent two days on a stretcher in an overcrowded waiting room at an understaffed North Vancouver hospital.
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“It’s a disaster. We have a health care crisis, there’s no doubt about it,” said BC Liberal finance critic Peter Milobar. “And the only one who really doesn’t seem to want to admit it is the health minister, shockingly enough.”
Milobar pointed out that after a patient died waiting in a Fredericton emergency room last week, New Brunswick Premier Blaine Higgs fired the province’s health minister and the head of the health authority.
Postmedia News learned of the death Monday and was told Dix was not available for an interview all week. Attempts to contact the minister continued on Friday.
Multiple rural hospital emergency rooms were forced to temporarily close this spring and summer due to staff shortages. And there were at least three incidents within a year where people lost their lives waiting for emergency help.
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At Lions Gate Hospital, an elderly woman died July 11 after lying on a stretcher for at least two days in an emergency room waiting room that officials say was severely understaffed. Vancouver Coastal Health said they are now reviewing the incident.
Coastal Management has met with the family to offer further support and will continue to meet with them to answer any questions they may have. The family is also referred to VCH’s Patient Experience team to ensure they receive caring support.
On Sunday in Ashcroft, a woman who lived on the same block as the local hospital, which was closed at the time due to lack of staff, died after going into cardiac arrest and it took 30 minutes for an ambulance to arrive, according to details provided by the mayor of Ashcroft Barbara Roden and Provincial Health Services.
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Last September, a 70-year-old patient died in the emergency room of the Royal Inland Hospital in Kamloops. After that incident, Dix said there will be a full review of what went wrong.
Doctors of BC President Dr. Josh Gregane. jpg
This crisis in the primary care system began before COVID-19, and there is no simple solution, said Doctors of British Columbia President-Elect Dr. Josh Gregane. For example, hospitals need more nurses, doctors and allied health workers, and more long-term care beds are needed to move stable elderly patients out of hospitals to alleviate long waits in emergency rooms.
“When terrible things happen, like what happened in Ashcroft, in Fredericton, as well as in Lions Gate,” he said, “we have to move forward with significant investment in our human resources as well as our actual physical resources, to make sure that similar situations never happen again.”
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Gregane said he wishes he could be more optimistic, but until there is a systemic improvement in the health care system, British Columbians should probably expect more emergency room closures and outages this summer.
“There are not enough doctors. There is not enough room for emergencies. There aren’t enough nurses. There are not enough family doctors. Not enough people get the care they need, or keep them out of the emergency room, or once they get to the emergency room, systemic problems including bed shortages and understaffing continue to plague all patients around the world province “, he said.
Not only are patients affected by this shortage, but so are healthcare workers in these overcrowded and understaffed hospital wards. Adrian Gear, vice-president of the British Columbia Nurses Union, visited Lions Gate nurses this week who are still upset they couldn’t do more to help the woman who died in their waiting room.
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“The nurses feel that this is something that could have been avoided if this patient had access to actual emergency care that would have included monitoring,” she said. “This is not the first time this (death in the emergency room) has happened. They don’t think it will be the last. They are ruined.”
Geer added that Dix was “tone deaf” to say in earlier interviews that this shortage was due to employees calling in sick. While she acknowledged that nurses are getting sick from COVID, she claimed Lions Gate ER has 30 nursing vacancies due to a lack of recruitment and retention.
British Columbia Green Party Leader Sonia Furstenau said it’s clear that every aspect of the health system, from ambulance care to emergency rooms to primary care, is crippled by staff shortages “and the cost of that is measured in lives “.
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Both Fürstenau and Milobar pointed out that the BC Ferries board fired its president after ferry cancellations and underperformance, but the same standard does not apply to health authorities or the Ministry of Health.
Ashcroft Mayor Barbara Rhoden said after the woman’s death Sunday that she had heard from residents in the community of 1,500 who were angry that more was not being done to prevent the hospital from closing. Roden spoke with Interior Health on Friday about getting consistency with their emergency room so residents don’t have to check Facebook forums to find out if it’s open.
The deaths in her community and North Vancouver should be a wake-up call to the consequences of not acting quickly enough to address the health care shortage, Roden said.
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“You know, we have the (hospital) facilities in many communities, but how do we make sure those facilities don’t become mausoleums?”
kderosa@postmedia.com
lculbert@postmedia.com
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A North Van patient has died after two days stuck in the waiting room of an overcrowded, understaffed hospital
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A Kamloops woman died in the Royal Inland Hospital emergency room
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