Perth hospital patients ‘permanently in the hallway’

An ER doctor in Perth, Ont. says he and his co-workers are seeing more patients being forced to wait and be treated in hospital hallways.

An emergency room physician in the Ottawa Valley says patients at the Perth and Smiths Falls District Hospital (PSFDH) are regularly being cared for in hallways.

“We in Perth are now permanently in the hallway. Happy to have space, any space, to see a patient but the loss of dignity and confidentiality is tough to swallow and condone. It’s not my admin, it’s not my CEO, it’s my Minister of Health,” said a post on X from Dr. Alan Drummond.

Drummond told CTV News on Saturday that the Perth campus has been operating at up to 120 per cent capacity.

“Every day I come here and there are five or six people waiting for a bed to be admitted,” Drummond said

“It’s either, see you in the hallway and reduce your wait time from three or four hours, or wait for your turn to have a private stretcher and wait to be seen in six to eight hours.”

Drummond’s post came a day PSFDH posted on social media that it is dealing with capacity pressures at both of its hospital sites.

The hospital says it is dealing with an extremely high number of patients.

“The PSFDH Team continues to assess each person and treat the sickest patients first. This means that some patients may experience a longer wait,” the hospital wrote on Facebook.

This week the Ottawa Hospital also announced it was preparing “unconventional spaces,” such as its gymnasium, to handle an influx of patients.

In a thread on X, formerly Twitter, the hospital said increased patient volumes are typical this time of year, but its current capacity is being “challenged.”

It comes as Ottawa Public Health reports “very high and increasing” levels of flu across the region, according to its respiratory surveillance dashboard.

“I can tell you this is coast to coast,” Drummond said. “This is every hospital in every jurisdiction in Canada.”

Drummond says that while he is thankful there is space such as hallways and waiting rooms to treat patients, it removes confidentiality and a sense of dignity during vulnerable times.

“When you have to tell somebody that they may have terminal cancer and they’re sitting in the hallway with three other people, that’s a bummer.”

A recent report from Health Quality Ontario said that four out of five hospital emergency rooms in Ottawa exceeded the provincial average for wait times to see a doctor in the fall.

Drummond says more beds and more physicians are the solution to the hallway healthcare issue plaguing Canada and points the finger at Ontario Premier Doug Ford.

“It’s not our administrator’s fault. It’s not our board’s fault. It clearly lies within the purview of our Minister of Health, the Ford government. They’re the ones that promised in their first term to reduce hallway medicine, to actually eliminate hallway medicine,” he said.

“Under the leadership of Premier Ford, our government has made record investments in our healthcare system, investing over $85 billion this year alone, a 31 per cent increase from 2018. We have increased our investment across the hospital sector by four per cent for a record two years in a row, we are getting shovels in the ground for over 50 hospital development projects across the province, building on the over 3,500 hospital beds we have added since 2020, Together, the changes our government has made have allowed Ontario to achieve some of the shortest wait times across the province, and we are not stopping there,” said the Ministry of Health in a statement.

“Our government has added 15,000 new physicians and 100,000 new nurses since 2018. To ensure people are connected with the right care in the right place, our government has also taken bold, and innovative action to introduce our minor ailments and 9-1-1 models of care, increased our investments to reduce emergency department wait times through local, innovative solutions, and expanded opportunities for 1,000 nurses in rural and remote hospitals to develop new skills to provide emergency department care.”