Long waits in emergency departments result in harm to patients, doctors told The Trillium
One in every 10 patients admitted to a hospital in Ontario from an emergency department waits at least two days before they get a bed, according to an internal government document.
The nearly 50 hours from the moment those patients walk in the door to the time they’re in an inpatient bed is a historical high. The long waits on stretches in emergency departments result in actual harm to the province’s most vulnerable, emergency physicians told The Trillium.
“They’re sick, they’re frail, they’ve come in late,” said Alan Drummond, an emergency physician in Perth, who had four patients on stretchers in his small, rural emergency department the day he spoke with The Trillium. “They need to be admitted. They’re stuck in a hospital hallway for 24, 36, 48 hours, and waiting for that hospital bed to materialize.
“And while they’re there, they suffer increasing complications in terms of their medical illness. They have delayed access to the treatments that would be necessary should they have been admitted. They develop delirium. They get totally confused. Their dementia gets worse. And we know there’s a mortality rate — people actually die as a result of that prolonged wait for bed admission.”
Raghu Venugopal, an emergency physician in Toronto, described what he saw before speaking with The Trillium on Tuesday when the emergency department was too busy for paramedics to offload their patients: rows and rows of stretchers “filled with silver and gray-haired senior citizens silhouetted on Orange EMS blankets.”
“I will physically go see that patient, I will see them in the corridor, I will see them on the paramedic’s stretcher, I will see them in the back of a triage office or in the waiting
