Hospital capacity crisis could soon affect surgeries, CEO says

The CEO of Horizon Health says the crisis of alternative-level-of-care patients taking up hospital beds is getting worse and could soon start to compromise the ability to schedule surgeries.

Margaret Melanson told MLAs on the legislature’s public accounts committee that these patients, also known as ALC patients, now take up 40 per cent of Horizon beds — “the single biggest factor affecting our emergency departments.”

“Without urgent systemic change these challenges will only continue, and possibly worsen,” Melanson said Thursday.

ALC patients have no medical need to be in hospitals but are housed there when there are no available nursing home spaces for them to go to.

Melanson sounded the same alarm to the same committee last October, even offering to give up part of her budget if the government were willing to divert that money into long-term-care spaces.

But so far nothing has changed, she said.

The Holt government has not announced any new nursing homes since it took office. 

“It is incredibly frustrating,” Melanson told reporters.

“We really haven’t seen marked improvement at all. The high numbers continue to be very, very alarming for us.”

Last month Premier Susan Holt said 1,076 people are on the waiting list for nursing home spaces, half of them ALC patients in hospitals.

So far, the spillover effect is in emergency departments, which are clogged with patients waiting for an inpatient bed to open up.

The average time for a patient with an urgent condition to be seen is 231 minutes or almost four hours, compared to the benchmark of 30 minutes, Melanson said.

The average time an emergency patient waits for a bed is 18 hours, she added.

She told reporters that if the situation isn’t better by this time next year, it may start to compromise the spaces hospitals use for surgeries.