THUNDER BAY – The Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre continues to struggle with surge capacity that is expected to continue for at least several more weeks.
“The capacity crisis is intensifying,” said Stewart Kennedy, executive vice-president of medical and academic affairs at the Thunder Bay regional Health Sciences Centre.
Last week, hospital administration said they were experiencing a surge capacity crisis, with 78 patients admitted to hospital over normal capacity.
“We have more patients in our beds than we did last week at this time,” Kennedy said. “Our current capacity right now, we have 375 funded beds, and as of this morning we have about 465 patients. In the previous week, we had about 440 patients. So we have another 80 or 85 patients in the hospital that we are having difficulty finding spaces for.”
A severe flu season is contributing largely to the surge capacity crisis, and Kennedy said the hospital is doing everything it can to find more spaces, including opening a special unit on the first floor of the hospital that provided access to nine more beds, as well as opening up ambulatory care for six additional beds.
“We really are at our maximum limit,” Kennedy continued. “We’ve reached out to our partners at St. Joseph’s Care Group and they have opened up extra beds to help with the troubles we are having here even though they are having some outbreaks of influenza in their hospital, so it’s a system wide problem.”
Other protocols have been put in place to ease the stress of the situation on staff, including restricting emergency room visits and housing male and female patients in the same room, which is not standard procedure.
Kennedy said he also met with surgeons on Wednesday to look at the possibility of conducting more outpatient procedures over the next several weeks to reduce the number of inpatients recovering in hospital.
“We don’t really want to cancel any of our surgeries, because these patients prepare six months to come for surgery and there is a lot of disruption to family and a lot of suffering that goes on,” Kennedy said.
According to Kennedy, hospital staff expect this crisis to peak over the next one to two weeks before gradually getting better over the next three weeks.
“We think this crisis is going to go on for a number of weeks yet,” he said.
The surge capacity crisis will serve as a learning experience for staff and administration at the hospital, Kennedy said, and going forward he would like to see more promotion for the annual flu shot, quicker turnaround times for patients receiving diagnosis of some infections the hospital sees, and having primary care more involved, such as after-hour clinics open on a more regular basis.
Kennedy added he understands this can be a difficult situation for patients and family members and he urges people to use clinics and primary care providers for non-urgent care. For people who do require services at the hospital, he asks that everyone remember the staff is under a great deal of stress and pressure during this difficult time.
“Just be respectful of the staff and understand what they are going through right now,” he said. “They are doing a great job trying to work within an environment that is very difficult to work within.”
