Patient left on stretcher for five days

TORONTO • 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,” she says. “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.”

While Ball was at the emergency department that morning on March 25, 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.

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.

Dr. Naveed Mohammad, vice-president of medical affairs at the William Osler Health System, of which the Brampton hospital is a part, said in an email 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 250 patients in a 24-hour period, the doctor said, but often sees more than 400.

Ontario Minister of Health Dr. Eric Hoskins admits there’s “more we can do” to open up beds for patients. Since 2013, 860 new beds have been added in hospitals across the province, he said in an emailed statement.

The minister said he’s looking into Ball’s case to ensure “patients are treated with dignity and respect.”