Stop pointing finger at Barrette

The easiest, though usually not the most effective, way to solve problems is to blame someone else.

Health-care facilities, doctors and the public are blaming Health Minister Gaétan Barrette when they should be looking inward at the dysfunctional state of many of our hospitals.

After working nearly a dozen years as a nurse in a medical/surgical ward at a Montreal hospital, I was frequently “in charge” of as many as 24 beds.

I believe there are simple solutions to overcrowded emergency rooms, delayed surgeries and hospitals that cannot meet their budgets. Refreshingly, these do not involve firing the health minister.

The trick is to look at how wards function. When they have available beds, they can admit patients from the emergency room and intensive care unit, thereby slashing occupancy rates in ERs and decreasing wait times for operations.

If an efficiency expert were to examine the occupancy rates of most hospital wards, he or she would find there are many beds occupied by patients who, simply put, could be elsewhere or even at home.

That being said, I believe that at least 15 per cent of patients occupy beds needlessly.

This figure leads us to the magic 85 per cent, the rate at which Barrette says hospitals need to be funded.

Doctors have a bad habit of keeping beds on wards full mainly because of a lack of foresight.

For example, in my experience, they tend to do their discharge rounds late in the afternoon, meaning patients wait around all day to go home.

As well, many tests can be done on an outpatient basis instead of keeping beds occupied with patients waiting for things like MRIs.

And many patients receiving intravenous antibiotics do not need to stay in a hospital; CLSC nurses can administer the drugs at patients’ homes.

Inefficient post-operative care on the part of staff can mean that patients linger on wards for days longer than they need to. If a tube stays in a day longer than it has to, so does the patient.

Staff on wards have a terrible habit of using cellphones far too often for personal use during work hours.

It’s not unusual to see warning signs in break rooms that say: “Cellphone usage is restricted to your breaks only!”