LHSC emergency department sees lengthy wait times and cleanliness concerns
After a drop during the peak of the pandemic, the demand for emergency services in London is once again on the rise.
Arden Urbano says her heart sank when she saw a very overcrowded waiting room as she walked through the doors of Victoria Hospital’s emergency department with her 18-year-old daughter -- who was suffering from severe back pain.
“The woman beside me had been there seven hours, another elderly woman waited with her elderly husband for six hours. It was so frightening that we ended up leaving,” said Urbano.
Dr. Christie MacDonald, city-wide chief, Department of Emergency Medicine with London Health Science Centre (LHSC) confirms emergency wait time have increased, because the volume of patients has also increased -- something that is not just unique to London, but is being played out at health centres across the country.
“There are a number of reasons that patients are seeking care, I think many have deferred care over the course of the pandemic, and now are presenting because they do need our emergency medicine services within the city,” said MacDonald.
Patients are triaged according to the severity of their illness with wait times varying throughout the day.
LHSC says they have actually expanded staffing lines to create a pipeline of people, including newly graduated nursing staff, to backfill during the pandemic in hopes of reducing wait times.
“We’ve been stressing wellness for all of our staffs, our physicians, and taking care of themselves because we can’t provide care that we need to for patients, and we continue to do so. Even though that may mean that in some regards, we have had an uptick in sick time across the ranks,” said Cathy Vandersluis, vice-president of Clinical Programs at LHSC.
Urbano says the wait times are not the only issue, with a lack of patient privacy and the state of the emergency room also concerning.
“In the entire time that I was there -- there wasn’t anybody cleaning. It was evidently filthy, some of the chairs were marked with X there were people sitting in them -- masks were prevalent, but as far as cleanliness -- a big zero for that,” said Urbano.
Vandersluis says it is challenging for the cleaning staff to keep up with the volumes during certain times of the day.
“There is a lot of business in a confined space, and our cleaning staff can’t be as effective as they would like to be when they are working among that many of people in a tight space.”
Urbano says her daughter was able to get the first appointment at a walk-in clinic the following day and is going to be OK.
But as far as future visits to the emergency department go, Urbano says, “I literally want to make sure that I am healthy so that I don’t have to use our health care system -- that’s how it feels to me -- because it would be terrifying if it was anything more serious than what I went through.”
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