Vancouver is a shithole at the best of times. Crawling with junkies who are being given free needles and comped government-grade heroin, you can only imagine in your wildest nightmares how bad it can be.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of normal humans there, too. What do you get when you mix strung-out junkies with the populous? A really busy emergency room
Hallway medicine is hitting new highs in congested Lower Mainland hospitals, as was demonstrated Monday night when Royal Columbian Hospital was forced to use its Tim Hortons outlet as an overflow ward.
Fraser Health officials say a combination of multiple trauma case airlifts earlier in the day and heavy pressure on the emergency department led staff to put patients in the hospital coffee shop.
It’s an unusual example of what has become a routine problem across the region: too many patients and not enough beds.
“Last night the hallways were two and three stretchers deep with patients,” said Dr. Sheldon Glazer, an emergency physician at Royal Columbian, the region’s trauma centre.
“This is just a natural progression of what we’ve been dealing with for a long, long time,” Glazer said. “We are forced to see patients in waiting rooms, in hallways and, now, in the Tim Hortons.”
The veteran ER doctor says halls jammed with stretchers are both inefficient and dangerous – particularly if a fire broke out.
Lovely. Read Andrew Lawton’s opinion here.
[...] friend of mine is having her infant son treated in St Tim’s over in Vancouver. He’s 16 months old, and suffers from terrible seizures. Yesterday he almost died – again. [...]
[...] Naturally the Conservatives are being blamed. After all, fuzzy-bunny Labour just kept dumping untold amounts of money into the NHS – not that it did any good. Canada throws money at the problem all the time, too, and yet still people are being triaged through a Tim Horton’s in the lobby. [...]