SASKATOON – Capacity issues in the province’s health care system are under scrutiny again after videos have surfaced online showing crowded conditions in the hallways at Royal University Hospital in Saskatoon.
On Facebook, a woman had posted two videos this week which showed patients lining the hallways in beds outside the emergency room inside Royal University Hospital.
“Welcome to Royal University Hospital in Saskatoon,” her caption read on one video posted Sept. 25. “How is this an acceptable level of care?”
In her caption below the video she noted there are small partitions separating patients with “no privacy, no security.” She also noted that a neighbour needed a blood transfusion, another had cancer, and that the “whole hallway was there for my mom’s echocardiogram!”
The video got the attention of opposition New Democrats, who immediately blasted the government on Thursday in Saskatoon.
“Saskatchewan used to be known for having the best healthcare in Canada but now we’re dead last,” said Keith Jorgenson, NDP Associate Health critic, in a statement.
“When our loved ones need emergency care, they deserve the best we can give them. Frankly, this makes me afraid to get sick while a Sask. Party government is in charge.”
The NDP noted that the two videos had been viewed 240,000 times on Facebook as of Wednesday afternoon. “This is not the image we want for Saskatchewan — people are leaving and others will refuse to come here when they see this,” Jorgenson said in a statement.
“After 18 years, the Sask. Party government is out of ideas and they stopped caring a long time ago. We can’t keep expecting a brighter future if we have the same old government that broke healthcare in the first place. We need new ideas and big bold change to get our health system out of last place.
In a conference call with reporters, John Ash, Vice-President Integrated Saskatoon Health, Saskatchewan Health Authority, acknowledged there had been capacity pressures at Royal University Hospital.
"Certainly myself personally and the rest of the SHA were very much aware of recent capacity increases we had at Royal University Hospital last week," Ash told reporters.
He said there were a number of reasons for the "heightened volume" in the emergency department at RUH. "A compacting factor was certainly the early presence of some of our seasonal flu but that was one of many reasons going forward."
Ash said they were "aware of the video that was posted on social media, and through that process actually myself and my Chief Medical Health officer partner had an opportunity to talk to one of the family members that were impacted by that situation and explained obviously that is not our ideal environment that we want to be able to provide care and treatment to patients, but we did explain that our ultimate goal is to make sure that patients have timely access to our emergency departments — they're not waiting for extended period times in the waiting room."
Ash explained that during times of heightened capacity, "some of those patients are moved into outside of the core emergency department, and I know the video was a reflection of that particular environment. So as I said, part of the reason that occurs during those surge periods is to make sure that our emergency departments were able to quickly have available capacity to meet the needs… Our ultimate goal is we don't want to have patients waiting in the hallway, and that's why in March of this year there was an announcement around adding an additional 109 beds to our overall capacity within the city of Saskatoon."
Of those, 20 of those initial beds are now operational and the remaining beds will come over the next number of months starting through the fall, he said.
For the additional beds, Ash said they had to do renovations in an existing space at City Hospital to "bring it up to the standard that we require for an inpatient unit." He said there will be a sequential addition of beds in the next number of months.
When asked why people were in the hallways, Ash said that "like any emergency department that you'll experience across Canada and beyond, emergency departments do have periods where high volumes of patients will present for a variety of reasons. Could be injury, illness or what have you. Certainly we had a high number of kind of normal presentation volumes of people walking into the door and yet a higher number of admission volume of coming to the door leading up to the subsequent days prior to the situation that we're speaking about. So more people are accessing the emergency department and they were sicker, resulting in more people being admitted which created more capacity challenges within our hospital system."
Ash said they have started to see "early information of seasonal respiratory illnesses beginning to present themselves in our emergency department."
As for whether the other hospitals in the city were seeing similar issues, Ash said St. Paul's Hospital emergency was busy, but "it wasn't to the extent that we were seeing at RUH." City Hospital was also busy, but "not to the same volume."
Ash also indicated things may be improving. At RUH, Ash said, they "started experiencing a climbing capacity early last week."
Ash said capacity has improved, and they been able to close that additional surge capacity space seen in the video.
"There are still some patients in the hallway area of the main emergency department, and we anticipate that that will probably continue based on the capacity we're seeing at least for a couple more days, but we are beginning to see the situation improve," said Ash.
