Ottawa hospital crowding ‘crisis’ raised in legislature

Hospital overcrowding is a systemic problem that is going to get worse in Ontario without serious attention from the provincial government, says NDP health critic France Gélinas.

Gélinas raised the case of Margaret Otto in the legislature Tuesday.

The 94-year-old Ottawa woman, who waited more than a day in the Queensway Carleton Hospital emergency room for a bed recently, was featured in an Ottawa Citizen story.

“When will the premier stop forcing seniors like Margaret Otto to be treated in hallways and do something to solve the overcrowding crisis they have created?” Gélinas asked.

Otto was one of 15 patients at the Queensway Carleton on a recent Monday morning for whom there were no beds available.

She stayed in an emergency department observation room on a stretcher until a bed became available, more than a day after she arrived at the hospital.

The hospital has been forced to cancel 36 elective surgeries in recent months due to overcapacity.

“I’m concerned about patients in pain or discomfort being told to wait even longer,” Gélinas said.

“I’m concerned about people being left in a hallway bed that doesn’t offer the comfort they need.”

Gélinas said the overcapacity problem at Ottawa hospitals is also seen across the province. Some hospitals have been overcapacity for virtually all of the past four years.

“It has been happening in pretty much every large community hospital,” she said.

In January, the Ontario Hospital Association wrote that emergency department wait times are the longest on record since the province started measuring them nine years ago, Gélinas said.

Leah Levesque, vice-president of patient care and chief nursing executive at Queensway Carleton Hospital, told the Citizen this month that the extended overcapacity situation there is worrisome.

“I think we are all worried about that one adverse event in our emergency departments,” Levesque said.

“It is not going to be a good outcome for anybody. We all are fully aware of the high risk at this point.”

In November, the province provided an additional $140 million for hospital services, says the hospital association, which calls it welcome, but not enough.

In the legislature, Health Minister Eric Hoskins said the province has a strategy to reduce occupancy rates and has invested in hospital operating budgets, and independent reports have shown that wait times are, generally, going down. “But we know there is work to be done.”

In 2016-17, the province provided more than $485 million to publicly-funded hospitals, said a Health Ministry spokesman. Part of that money was aimed at addressing the pressure that so-called alternate-level-of-care patients — those who no longer need acute care but have no other place to go — put on hospitals, the ministry said.

The Ottawa Hospital has seen an increase in provincial funding of 48 per cent since 2003-04, a ministry spokesman said.

The hospital received $703.5 million from the province for 2016-17. Queensway Carleton Hospital, he said, has had a 106-per-cent funding increase in the same period.

Gélinas said more money should be invested in home care, but it should go to non-profit companies, rather than for-profit companies “fighting to get a bigger share of the lucrative homecare market.

“Some things are not for sale. We should make sure the billions that we invest in home care actually goes into delivery.”