Royal University Hospital\u2019s (RUH) emergency department has more patients receiving treatment in halls than rooms.<\/p>\n
Drayson McGilvery has been a full-time nurse in the department for two-and-a-half years. He said RUH\u2019s emergency has capacity for about 23 people to get a bed in a room but because of overcrowding, it\u2019s meant roughly 28 to 32 beds have been added in its hallways.<\/p>\n
Read more:<\/p>\n
It\u2019s left many patients trying to recover in an \u201coverstimulating\u201d environment, according to McGilvery.<\/p>\n
He said the halls are \u201ccritical transport routes,\u201d so there\u2019s a lot of movement in these areas as healthcare workers move past, including nurses who are navigating patients on ventilators with several IV pumps through the narrow space.<\/p>\n
Those patients in the hallway also have to hear call bells going off at all times of the night. Their health is also at risk because of their constant exposure to the critically-ill people being transported through the hallway.<\/p>\n
Health-care workers also face issues trying to provide confidential patient care in a public space.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re giving reports at the desk. We\u2019re talking to physicians. We\u2019re making very important phone calls about patients\u2019 care, about patients who are in rooms, and this hallway patient is having to listen to all this,\u201d McGilvery said.<\/p>\n
He said with so many people needing a spot to lay, sometimes nurses in the department have to make tough calls on who gets put in the hallway versus a room.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou have to just go off of who\u2019s the most stable and sometimes the most stable person is your elderly person with dementia, and that\u2019s not a good environment for them to be in the hallway, but that\u2019s your most stable person,\u201d McGilvery said, adding how it\u2019s \u201cdisheartening\u201d to have to do that.<\/p>\n
While most patients understand the nurses\u2019 aren\u2019t at fault for hallway healthcare, McGilvery said some get upset, \u201cas they should.\u201d<\/p>\n
Overcapacity issues aren\u2019t new to the department, he noted.<\/p>\n
McGilvery said there\u2019s been hallway beds in RUH\u2019s emergency for more than a year now and there\u2019s a good chance it\u2019s impacted the health outcomes for patients.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is cases where there\u2019s a lot of delay of care and there\u2019s a lot of fixing things that could have been prevented,\u201d he said, especially since the halls aren\u2019t designed for patients to be in them.<\/p>\n
Call to action<\/p>\n
McGilvery was one of the roughly 450 health-care workers who signed a letter, addressed to Health Minister Jeremy Cockrill, outlining the issues impacting emergency care across Saskatchewan. It was posted to the Saskatchewan Union of Nurses Facebook page earlier this week.<\/p>\n
For McGilvery, who also helped draft its contents, this letter was \u201ca cry for help.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said RUH isn\u2019t even the only hospital in Saskatoon struggling with overcrowding, with St. Paul\u2019s also going through the exact same thing.<\/p>\n
According to McGilvery, the letter was intended to be a call for collaboration to make plans for alleviating the mounting pressures on emergency departments.<\/p>\n
He said some of these pressures could be eased by improving access to primary and long-term care, which would keep more people out of the hospital and its hallways.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Royal University Hospital\u2019s (RUH) emergency department has more patients receiving treatment in halls than rooms. Drayson McGilvery has…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":240688,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[49,48,84,392],"class_list":{"0":"post-240687","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-healthcare"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=240687"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240687\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/240688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=240687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=240687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=240687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}