To the editor:
Our Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre is in serious trouble due to overcrowding.
Homeless, dischargeable patients, remaining in TBRHSC have numbered from a minimum of 27 to a high of 87 over the last two years.
An average of 45 of these residents have been waiting for beds in nursing homes which are also in short supply.
Recent figures from the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care (the Ministry) show 59 residents in TBRHSC, 67 in Saint Josephs Hospital and 48 in the Lakehead Psychiatric Hospital. Nursing homes are full or in such bad condition the residents do not wish to move to them.
Causes of congestion
1. Successive Health Ministries and our City of Thunder Bay have neglected the maintenance, renovation and replacement of some of our nursing and long-term care homes until they are so dilapidated no one wishes to occupy them. Many elect to stay in TBRHSC.
2. Dischargeable patients have been allowed to remain in TBRHSC until they can move into the homes of their choices. The extent of the burden is illustrated by the above numbers.
3. Some patients from our region, who come to TBRHSC for surgery or other special treatments, find all the beds in their home-town hospitals are occupied so they must stay in TBRHSC to recuperate.
Effects of congestion at TBRHSC:
3. Potential patients are excluded because beds are not available to them while they receive treatment and recover from it. Two of our Thunder Bay citizens required hernia operations. Their wait time was 16 months even though eleven Thunder Bay doctors were qualified to do the surgery.
They went to Toronto and had the operations done after waiting five weeks. For patients like that, Thunder Bay has no hospital.
4. Many of our citizens must go to other cities for treatments and operations that could be performed here by Thunder Bay doctors if beds were available in which to recuperate.
5. Because of bed shortages, regional towns like Nipigon are restricted to sending their needy patients to TBRHSC on only two or three days per month in spite of the fact ours is a regional hospital.
6. Some doctors leave Thunder Bay to find work that will utilize their time or take their patients with them to an available operating room. Some doctors may not return.
7. Patients who are undergoing treatment, or recovering from it, routinely find themselves on cots in our hospital’s corridors. These people are subjected to noise all night and so suffer sleep privation which is not conducive to tolerating pain and anxiety nor to their early recovery.
8. People have reported seeing ambulances lined up at the Emergency Department entrance to TBRHSC so the incoming patients in them can have places to rest. Not only is a shortage of beds prevalent at the hospital but cots, stretchers, gurneys and sometimes ambulances can also be in short supply.
9. The Emergency Department at TBRHSC handles 109,000 cases per year and maintains one of the shortest wait times in the Province. It too must sometimes put patients on hold for up to two days.
Consequences of congestion at TBRHSC
1. People in Thunder Bay will have to accept inferior health services or campaign to have them provided by city and provincial governments.
2. Building and retaining a cadre of competent surgeons, and medical doctors with other specialties, becomes very difficult at a hospital with a chronic shortage of beds.
3. No service, poor service, long wait times, costly traveling to other hospitals, etc, encourages privatization of health services. What a disaster that could be.
4. Millions of taxpayers’ dollars are being wasted. The average daily cost per resident for room and board in long-term basic accommodations across Ontario is about $55. In TBRHSC the cost is $1,000 per person per day or $365,000 per person per year. For the last two years the average of 45 of these residents in TBRHSC has been consuming $15 million worth of room and board per year. Forty-five residents, at $55 per day, would consume only $1 million per year.
Therefore our province is wasting $14 million per year at TBRHSC by not providing a transition house. We wonder how Premier McGuinty rationalizes that.
The remedy for the congestion at TBRHSC:
Friends Of Our Regional Hospital believe the only means of eliminating the misuse of beds and the overcrowding at TBRHSC is the creation of a 100-bed, or larger, transition house they will call Harmony Hall until an official name is chosen.
Harmony Hall must be required to accept all homeless TBRHSC dischargeable acute care patients destined for alternate level of care (ALC), long-term care (LTC) homes or return to their hometown hospitals.
As the workload at St. Joseph’s Hospital increases, it is likely the demand for Harmony Hall beds will also increase and provision for that should be made in the design. Harmony Hall should not be allowed to be used as a nursing or long-term care facility.
Because of the propensity for putting patients in hospital hallways, the corridors of Harmony Hall should be at least eight feet wider than normal to provide a lot of space for corridor patients in the event an epidemic such as West Nile virus or swine flu hits Thunder Bay. There is no surplus space in our system at the moment.
What will be done about this congestion problem?
Friends Of Our Regional Hospital will have appropriate petitions delivered to city residences before the end of October. All city residents, aged 18 years or more, will be asked to sign and return the petitions to indicate whether they want Harmony Hall and how it should be financed.
It is expected the petitions will be presented to Thunder Bay city council and to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario.
Cec Cranton, Chairman
Friends Of Our Regional Hospital
