The emergency room at the Anna-Laberge Hospital in Montérégie reached a 200% occupancy rate, a chaotic situation that led a nurse to condemn it in a publication on Facebook.
A video recorded on Tuesday afternoon shows a dozen ambulances waiting for the emergency with their patient. Due to the lack of stretchers, the patients are unable to be cared for.
According to our information, an elderly man in a confused state had to wait 6 hours on a stretcher for paramedics in a garage. It is not even possible to give him space inside the corridor. And he’s not alone, judging the patients as “pitiful.”
Kathy LaRocque, an exhausted nurse, cried her heart out yesterday by posting her message on Facebook. Her classification: Don’t come to an emergency unless it’s an emergency, Anna-Laberge warned, describing the chaotic situation.
“This is called ambulance detention. There is no physical place to see a patient on a stretcher or set him up before seeing a doctor. As long as the patient is cared for by the paramedic, the latter is not elsewhere in the territory and cannot intervene for road accidents or heart attacks. Yes the health system is obsolete […] Please, if you can avoid the Anna-LaBerge emergency, do so. […] It’s a 24-30 hour wait at the hospital, and believe me, we’re not free … “
CETAM ensures that one of their ambulances is on site for six hours. “At lunchtime, the average time spent in the hospital center for our teams is 275 minutes. Per day, the average is 120 minutes. At 12:15 p.m., a third of our fleet (from our entire territory including Longueuil) was at Anna-Laberge Hospital.
In this case, it goes without saying that our management sent one of its members to the scene to find solutions and release the teams as soon as possible. In this way, we were able to avoid delays for priority calls,” said CETAM publicist Patrick Jasmin.
The local branch of the Interprofessional Health Federation shares the condemned nurse’s concerns.
“I have a lot of fears for the population because situations like this are more frequent. I have fears that there are errors or omissions or that people decide not to go to the emergency room without waiting,” explained Maxime Lafors-Stében of FIQ’s Union of Care Professionals of Montérégie-Ouest.
The direction of the Anna-Laberge Hospital explains that the situation in the emergency room has been caused by the unusual traffic of ambulances in the past few days.
“Over the past few days, the Anna-Laberge hospital received 14% more ambulances than the average, clearly. Hospitalization floors are overcrowded and many users of the emergency room require hospitalization. Labor shortage also has a major impact on admission capacity. In a move to reduce emergency room overcrowding, hospital teams opened 15 additional beds and diverted non-priority clients to other alternatives. Despite the challenges, the number of patients in acute care level (ASL) is very low (8.5%).
The management also invites people to go to the emergency room only in case of emergency.
“We also invite people who do not have a family doctor to approach the first line access counter. Depending on the situation, an appointment with a health professional may be made. In conclusion, teams are currently assembled to find other possible solutions. We thank the teams on the ground for allowing us to manage healthcare for the population.
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