ER doctor Joanne Rowell-Wong, head of the emergency department at Burnaby General Hospital, is speaking out about her concerns with overcrowding in the emergency room.
Rowell-Wong said the facility is filled to capacity on a regular basis, and patients are not being seen in a timely manner.
"It's quite frequent that we'll have over 20 admitted patients in our ER and we have 21 stretchers in those acute areas," she said. "So it means that sick people . they have to sit in those chairs and they have to stay in the waiting room."
Along with ER doctors at 18 other hospitals around the province, Burnaby General ER physicians are joining in a campaign to highlight the problem on the B.C. Emergency Care website - www. bcemergencycare.com.
In submitted videos on the site, doctors from other hospitals describe patients being seen in waiting areas because of a lack of beds; one waiting for up to 10 hours with a fractured spine and another who had a heart attack before he could be assessed by a doctor.
According to the website,
Burnaby General gets a failing grade for overcrowding and a "fair" grade for doctor shortage.
In the past year, the hospital has hired two ER doctors and increased doctors' hours by 50 per cent in the past four years, according to Rowell-Wong, but she said these upgrades have not fully met patient needs.
"The problem is that we've added all these physician hours, but we can't work efficiently if we can't put a person in a bed," she said.
Rowell-Wong noted Fraser Health is working with the hospital to alleviate some of the pressure by funding upgrade projects at Burnaby Hospital, slated for completion within three years.
Earlier this month the health authority announced a $5.5 million investment in upgrades, including the creation of a "supertrack" area of the ER to separate urgent and non-urgent patients.
While doctors acknowledge the benefit of this plan, the continuing staff shortage remains a concern, Rowell-Wong suggested.
"There's absolutely no commitment to increase staff," she said. "So we will more than double our space here, but there's absolutely no nursing that will be increasing - no support staff that will increase. So we feel that this should be a reflection of the needs in terms of planning."
In a report on the bce mergencycare.com website - called the B.C. ER Treatment Plan - ER doctors in B.C. are calling on the provincial government to fund an extra $10 million annually to help alleviate this kind of problem in the health-care system.
The last time the B.C. government directly increased funding to emergency rooms was in 2010.
B.C. Health Minister Margaret MacDiarmid said adding extra funding at this point is not feasible, however, without pulling funds already allocated to other areas in the health-care system.
The provincial government recently negotiated a $90 million physician master agreement with the British Columbia Medical Association, she noted.
"What is very difficult for us is for any physician group to have money over and above that extra money in the agreement," she said. "We have to find it within our existing budget, so that means stopping doing one of those other things, most likely. So it has a very negative impact."
MacDiarmid said she is committed to working with ER doctors to deal with their concerns but said providing additional funding "is a very difficult thing for (the government) to do." www.twitter.com/
MarelleReid
