Toronto, Canada – 18th April: After spending five days at the Brampton Civic Hospital, Jamie-Lee Ball was begging the nurses to discharge her.
Sitting in the hospital’s emergency room, the 24-year-old had collapsed in extreme pain from internal bleeding in her abdomen. The nurses had scrambled to find her a stretcher while she waited to be seen. Ball didn’t know it at that the time, but she would spend the entirety of her five-day stay at the hospital lying on that same stretcher — in a hallway.
“People go to the hospital and expect it to not be a vacation,” Ball said. “But to see the people being treated the way I saw them being treated … my mom made the comment that she felt like we were in a Third-World country.”
Seven weeks earlier, Ball had undergone major abdominal surgery. When she arrived at Brampton Civic Hospital’s emergency room on March 25 at 10:30 a.m., she was suffering from complications due to that procedure. While she was waiting to be seen, a “Code Gridlock” announcement on the PA system revealed that the hospital was at capacity and rooms were no longer available.
Ball — and more than a dozen other patients who needed them — would not get a room. After being seen by a doctor, she was stationed in a narrow hallway.
After two gruelling days surrounded by cancer patients and even a woman who had just given birth, the nurses had good news for Ball. She was ecstatic to learn she was finally getting a room in the neurology department.
“Really it’s a spot in the hallway with a sign on the wall that says ‘Hallway patient #1,’ ” Ball explained, adding that five other patients followed her there.
Being stationed there was the worst part of her stay, Ball said. Dementia and other mental-health patients were allowed to wander in the hallways, she said, and frequently passed by her stretcher yelling at the top of their lungs.
Even a trip to the washroom wasn’t easy. Nearly unable to stand, Ball had to leave her stretcher and make a painful two-minute walk down the hallway to a public washroom, dragging her IV pole behind her. When she got there, she had to wait in line with hospital visitors and other patients.
“Honestly, it was shocking to me,” said Ball, who was discharged without ever having a room. “It almost sounds like a fake story.”
Ball isn’t alone in facing arduous wait times in Ontario hospitals. According to the latest auditor general report, only 30 per cent of patients at three Ontario hospitals were transferred from the emergency room to acute-care wards in under eight hours — the target set by the province’s Ministry of Health. Instead, some languished in emergency rooms for 28 hours before getting a bed.
Dr. Naveed Mohammad, vice-president of medical affairs at the William Osler Health System, of which the Brampton Civic Hospital is a part, said in an emailed statement that the hospital has seen an “exceptionally high number of patients in its Emergency Department over the last number of months.”
“We are trying to accommodate all patients and do use unconventional spaces for patient rooms, including the use of hallway beds, during these extremely busy times,” Mohammad wrote.
The hospital was built to attend to only 250 patients in a 24-hour period, the doctor said, but often sees more than 400. It’s still struggling with overcrowding despite the William Osler Health System receiving $25 million from the provincial government to help fix the problem. The opening of another hospital —Peel Memorial Centre for Health and Wellness Campus — in the city west of Toronto has yet to yield any significant results because it does not offer overnight beds.
Source: http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/ontario-hospital-patient-suffering-from-internal-bleeding-left-on-stretcher-in-hallway-for-five-days