Defend Public Healthcare

The Lake of the Woods Hospital has lost its bid to extend its 1A bed crisis designation, which gave hospital in-patients priority for any long-term care beds that became available, the Miner & News reports .  The crisis designation had already been extended once.   The hospital bed crisis began in February with 15 patients in hospital beds awaiting beds in long-term care homes. Hospital president Mark Balcaen said there are now13 such patients. A similar crisis in 2010 was lifted when eight such patients remained at the hospital. "We have serious bed shortages within the hospital and we have a very large number of people awaiting a bed in town. The 1A status is about the only thing available to us to help alleviate the bed problems at the hospital," Balcaen said. "What we feel is appropriate here — and we thought the LHIN (Local Health Integration Network) had agreed as well — is we were in crisis when we had eight or more patients." Hospital chief of s

The Lake of the Woods Hospital has now received "1A crisis designation" as it has up to three patients daily occupying temporary beds in the hallway of the emergency department. Officials are already calling for the extention of the two-week designation that allows the 11 patients awaiting a long-term care bed to receive priority when beds open at the home of their choice. "It's inappropriate that acute care patients are lying in cots in the emergency room," said hospital chief of staff Kerry MacDonald. "The current situation creates the worst of both worlds but we're obligated to be complicit in this unethical situation. The ministry, to date, refuses to acknowledge or even deal with the fact that this is unethical. They talk about the need to comply with the law. The law is poorly written." Strong words. dallan@cupe.ca

Patients who no longer need medical or surgical beds (ALC patients) now occupy about half of the medical and surgical beds at the Lake of the Woods Hospital in Kenora, according to the Miner and News . Despite a rapidly aging population, the provincial government is slowing the development of new nursing home beds across the province. Some new transitional beds are being established in nursing homes, retirement homes, hospitals, and other facilities around the province, but not in sufficient numbers to stop the back up of patients in hospitals.  As a result, high bed occupancy constantly threatens the ability of the hospitals to treat new patients and provide adequate care.  "We've been fortunate that there hasn't been as much (admittance) as we had last fall and winter," said Mark Balcaen, the hospital CEO. "We're coping but at any moment, things could change. All you need is a four or five person surge to be admitted tonight and we're back to the

As it turns out, the new (and much ballyhooed) emergency room wait time funding will not go to any ER with less than 30,000 ER visits per year.    This is just the latest in a series of Liberal government hospital policies that discriminate against smaller towns and cities (remember, for example, the ER closures in Niagara?). Lake of the Woods Hospital, a reasonably large hospital in Kenora, falls 4,000 short of the 30,000 visit minimum. But its June wait time figures are 9.1 hours for high acuity and 5.2 hours compared to provincial expectations of eight and four hours, respectively. Local hospital president Mark Balcaen showed some guts, took this on, and defended his community: "The public sees ER wait times the same whether they are in a small, rural, isolated community or are in a large metropolitan area....A long ER wait is still a long ER wait no matter the size of the community or hospital. The people of Kenora complain just as much as the people of any other lar