Horizon treats patients in hallways, storage rooms as record-high beds occupied by long-term care patients

The number of Horizon hospital beds occupied by people awaiting long-term care has reached a record high, pushing occupancy rates to crisis levels, officials warned Thursday.

And the situation is only expected to get worse with an "imminent surge" of ER visits and hospital admissions during the respiratory season, Greg Doiron, vice-president of clinical operations, told the quarterly board meeting in Fredericton.

Horizon has struggled for years with so-called alternate level of care, or ALC patients languishing in hospital beds while they wait for a nursing home or special care home bed, or in-home services.

Last month, the board asked the executive leadership team to come up with solutions to try to get ahead of the capacity challenges before the peak respiratory season.

To illustrate the current impact ALC patients are having, Doiron cited the example of the Dr. Everett Chalmers Regional Hospital in Fredericton, where only 10 of 30 emergency beds were available, as of Thursday. "That's if you come in with a heart attack or a broken arm," he said.

The remaining 20 were occupied by patients who had been admitted to hospital but were waiting for a bed because they were all occupied.

About 42 per cent of beds at the Chalmers Hospital — 40 per cent Horizon-wide — are occupied by ALC patients, Doiron said.

Some admitted ER patients will wait up to two days for a hospital bed — which isn’t always in a room, Doiron said.

"Sometimes the space they're going to is a hallway, a storage room, an office with no bathroom, no privacy, no dignity, and ultimately no ability for them to benefit from the environments they need to be able to properly heal, both physically, emotionally and spiritually," he said.

"This is because our system is currently crippled by the fact that we have nearly 650 patients across our entire system who currently occupy a bed as a medically discharged patient."

Horizon has opened 190 "unfunded" beds to try to alleviate the pressure, with existing nurses, housekeeping staff, pharmacists and physiotherapists doing extra work, adding to burnout and morale problems, and adding more than $14 million to the deficit, the board heard.

Still, the number of ALC patients is expected to climb to 711 by Christmas, or 41 per cent of acute care beds, "just based on our normal rate of growth," Doiron said.

After that, "unfortunately, it gets worse," he said, referring to anticipated cases of the flu, COVID-19 and respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV.

"So you can imagine the concern we have as an organization when we consider what we are preparing against, when we are looking at the highest rate of ALC we've ever seen as an organization."