QEH seeing little impact from closure of Summerside intensive care unit

Summerside's Prince County Hospital has gone almost two months now without an intensive care unit — and so far, the medical impact appears to be minimal.

Dr. Michael Gardam, the CEO of Health P.E.I., said fewer than two patients a week on average have been transferred from Summerside to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Charlottetown. In the last three weeks, there have been no transfers at all.

"Fortunately, because there's relatively few transfers going on, there hasn't been a significant impact on QEH," Gardam said. "We've never had to actually increase beds at QEH… 

"That doesn't mean I'm super happy with this and we can just keep it this way," he added. "This isn't what I want it to be."

The ICU at the Summerside hospital closed eight weeks ago due to a lack of internal medicine doctors willing to cover shifts there.

Gardam said there are still nurses and doctors providing a high level of care at Prince County Hospital, in what's now called a progressive care unit or PCU. Only the sickest patients need the specialized care an internal medicine doctor provides, he said.

It's not clear when the ICU at the Prince County Hospital will reopen. Gardam said before he'd consider that, the hospital would need to hire at least four internal medicine doctors.

"We are going to have to recruit internal medicine doctors who do want to cover the ICU if we're going to bring an ICU back to PCH," Gardam said. "And that's something that's not going to be fixed quickly."

Barbara Brookins, president of the P.E.I. Nurses' Union, said staff in Summerside are feeling added pressure on the job.

"You always have to have that in your mind, that you don't have an internist in the hospital.  And if this patient who was relatively stable and classified as a PCU patient right now deteriorates, there's not an internist around the corner, they're 45 to 50 minutes down the road, and that's after you package someone up and get them prepared for travel."

Gardam said the health-care system can't continue to rely on just one intensive care unit in the province — especially if some unforeseen circumstance caused the QEH's unit to close. 

"It would be better in my mind to have an ICU at PCH. We just need to have a model that's sustainable. We're looking at a whole bunch of angles all at once. But the reality is, we're not in the driver's seat here. It's not like we have the pick of people we can just hire."