Residents, physicians frustrated by closures
Matt Cochrane, who moved to Montague this past year from Alberta, is one of many Kings County residents frustrated with the continuous closure of their hospital’s emergency department.
“I want to see P.E.I. get bigger. We can’t talk about growth without execution,” he said at a meeting Thursday organized by local PC MLA Steven Myers on the topic of health care at Kings County Memorial Hospital.
Since the fall, the hospital’s ER has been closed over 20 times.
Cochrane says people considering moving to the Montague area – including doctors – are put off with the constant ER shutdowns.
“People don’t feel safe and secure in this region,” he said.
He was just one of the Montague residents packed into a room at the Cavendish Wellness
Centre who addressed P.E.I.’s
Health Minister Robert Mitchell.
Six weeks ago, Mitchell was in a similar meeting with a lot of the same faces. A new policy was announced taking effect June 1 that allowed front-line nurses to triage patients depending on the number of people waiting.
“There was an indication of splitting 14-hour shifts into two sevens with a layover hour. This was done in consultation with the physicians.”
It was an attempt at a solution, Mitchell said.
ER closures continued, so another solution was presented to reduce the hours of 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. to 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.
“Some (doctors) ended up in the ER till the wee hours in the morning.”
Monday and Wednesday primary care clinics were extended 4 to 7 p.m. to alleviate the pressure on the ER, Mitchell added.
He said he is trying to recruit doctors to assist in the Kings County emergency room.
“We continue to recruit for those full-time positions. Their main question is about work hours.”
Mitchell said practitioners of today are less likely than those in the past who would take on a large patient load.
Dr. Thor Christensen Montague, an emergency room doctor and family physician who was in the audience, felt physicians were being misrepresented. They were never advocating for reduced hours he said.
“In relation to physician burnout and mental health, I think we very much did have to make changes.”
Doctors’ 14-hour shifts in the emergency department were actually leading to 22-hour shifts, and then physicians were expected to be at work to do it all again, Christensen said.
“We as physicians did not advocate for a total reduction of hours.
That was a surprise to us as a group… We were advocating for a change in the structure of the 14 hours.”
Christensen said what doctors were looking for was an extra two hours: one hour to allow physicians to hand over information to other physicians to take over a case and the second hour for physicians to wrap up their day in a timely fashion, he said.
Christensen, who was born in the Kings County Memorial Hospital, said he is a third-generation Canadian and he wants to work in Montague.
“I want to stick around,” he said.