Charlottetown emergency department wait times remain high

Staff at Charlottetown's Queen Elizabeth Hospital are continuing to have trouble keeping up with the flow of patients in the emergency department.

Health PEI issued a news release Tuesday afternoon warning of higher than usual wait times, and the number of patients in the department only grew overnight.

Just before 7:30 a.m. the hospital was reporting wait times longer than 10 hours for all 17 patients in the waiting room. There were 10 patients being treated by a doctor, and a total of 56 in the emergency department.

That means at least 29 people are currently admitted to the emergency department, a number which Mike MacDonald, Health PEI's acting director of nursing, said should ideally be zero. But there is nowhere else for them, because all the other beds in the hospital are full.

"We started the day with 27," MacDonald told CBC News Tuesday afternoon.

"When we run 15 to 20, even that is a significant number, so there's not even a lot of room to see patients down in the emergency department. So all those things are contributing."

Wait times at Prince County Hospital in Summerside were closer to normal, at no more than four hours.

Holidays can be a problem in the emergency department, said MacDonald, because it is the one part of the health-care system that never slows down.

Family physicians may close their offices, there may be fewer walk-in clinics, elective surgeries may be put off. Emergency department hours at Kings County Memorial in Montague and Western Hospital in Alberton were reduced. When all those things stop, the emergency departments at P.E.I.'s two main hospitals remain.

Sometimes that helps. Health PEI has redeployed staff from outpatients departments, where fewer appointments are scheduled, to help in the emergency, but lack of access to primary care can leave patients with nowhere else to go.

"The emergency department is that sharp point in the health-care system. It's the only place for people to go so they do come," said MacDonald.

"We're seeing that in the volume."

On top of those acute issues are chronic problems in the system, such as a shortage of long-term care beds. That shortage, said MacDonald, eventually reveals itself as a problem in the emergency department. 

A patient waiting for a bed in long-term care is taking up a bed in acute care. That leaves someone in the emergency department with nowhere to go, which means doctors working there have less space to work with.