![]() Mohammed informs Bharaj his mother will be heading to the coronary care unit. She’s 93, he says, and had trouble breathing overnight, which led Bharaj to call an ambulance early this morning. Surinder Singh Bharaj has been in the emergency room for more than 12 hours with his mother Surjit, who’s sleeping peacefully in her hospital bed. In one private room, Mohammad speaks to a man in a mix of English and Punjabi. Now it’s nearly 6 p.m., and stretchers already encircle the main desk, creating a cacophony of beeping and humming. Since those beds upstairs are full, that wait can take hours, and when new patients arrive, often those in the private “Resus” rooms are bumped into the hallway. It’s a wing where staff take patients who need the most urgent care and constant monitoring - those who’ve suffered heart attacks, stab wounds, or injuries in a car accident - until they’re given a bed in the main hospital. (Paul Borkwood/CBC News)Īcross the hall, Mohammad is in the Resuscitation area, or “Resus” as staff call it. Surjit is 93, says her son, and had trouble breathing overnight. “But now, it’s like 120 you start your day with. “By the end of the night, we used to have like 40 patients,” explains Kalotia, who’s been a nurse here for six years. Those decisions are getting tougher as the number of patients coming in keeps ticking upwards, year by year. On those days, staff like her need to make tough decisions, like which patient to bring in first when two critically-injured people show up at the same time. Some days, she says, the whole “ATC” would be full by now. and the room is buzzing with activity, but Kalotia calls this a “good day.” Registered nurse Seema Kalotia is wearing purple scrubs and typing patient information into an electronic chart. One door off the main hallway leads to the Ambulatory Treatment Centre, an area for patients with urgent concerns that aren’t life-threatening, like pain, fever, or shortness of breath. They wind through hallways, connecting the triage area and ambulance bay to other wings that focus on the broad spectrum of patient ailments, from people with minor injuries to pregnancy complications to heavily-bleeding gunshot wounds. Like many emergency departments, the unit at Brampton Civic feels like a maze, even with color-coded strips lining the floors. “Yet our health care system is so challenged, and so bursting at the seams.” “We’re living in a first-world country that, to the outside world, has a lot of resources,” he tells us. Standing with our CBC Toronto crew in the triage area, Mohammad calls it a “frustrating” situation. Census data shows the population grew more than 13 per cent between 20 - nearly three times the national growth rate - and its diverse communities are experiencing high rates of chronic conditions like heart disease, high blood pressure, and kidney disease.įrom 2016 to 2017 alone, there were more than 140,000 visits to the Brampton ED, making it the highest-volume emergency department in the province, according to data from the Canadian Institute for Health Information.īut while Brampton Civic faces unique challenges, it’s also a case study for the problems facing many hospitals across Ontario: bed shortages, jam-packed emergency rooms, and a constant backlog that’s concerning for both staff and patients. That increase stems from Brampton’s booming population growth. Though it was built to serve 200 patients a day, the emergency department now sees double that, says Mohammad, the executive vice-president of quality, medical affairs, and academics at the three-site William Osler Health System. facility is still struggling to provide hospital beds for a rising number of patients. It’s a situation known internally as “code gridlock.” And despite the province adding a nearby urgent care centre, and opening dozens of new beds since then, the bustling Brampton, Ont. Other times, they’re stuck on stretchers in the brightly-lit hallways, surrounded by the beeping of machines and the hectic hum of hospital staff.Īs CBC Toronto reported last year, more than 4,300 patients were treated in the hospital’s hallways between the spring of 20, an average of roughly 12 people each day. ![]() Sometimes, they’re on beds in private rooms. And they often wind up waiting in the emergency area. Naveed Mohammad is bracing for that number to rise.Īn emergency physician for nearly three decades, Mohammad knows that even though clinicians try to see people quickly, roughly one out of every ten patients needs to be admitted to the Brampton, Ont. It’s late afternoon, and several stretchers are lining the main hallway of Brampton Civic’s emergency department.ĭr.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |