Hairy Potter писал(а):Прицепились к Тим Хортонсу несчастному...Один раз был большой наплыв пациентов в royal columbian emerg и все.
Толку в этом примере...Наоборот хорошо, хоть кофе какой-никакой рядом
“We’ve had an overcrowding problem that’s only gotten worse over the past many years,” said Glazer, who’s worked at Royal Columbian for 30 years.
Tim Hortons was used Monday because the hallways
were already packed.
“Last night the hallways were so full that nothing could move,” said Glazer. “It became a safety issue.
“Canadians are very patient,” he said. “If this was the U.S., it wouldn’t be patients lined up, it would be lawyers.”
Royal Columbian visitor Demetre Ekonomou was shocked about the coffee shop care.
“That’s ridiculous!” said the longtime Coquitlam resident.
“I can see that in some other nation in Europe or Egypt — but not here,” said Ekonomou, who was at the hospital accompanying his wife.
“The medical — I’m not happy with it,” he said, recalling a recent incident of his own where he fell and waited for treatment from 5 p.m. until 2 a.m. at Eagle Ridge Hospital in Port Moody.
But at least he was treated in a hospital, not a hospital restaurant.
Sitting at a table in Tim Hortons where patients were being housed the day before, Dorothy Burgess was surprised by the news.
Asked what she would think about being treated in a Tim Hortons, Burgess replied: “I’m in the Twilight Zone.”
But Robert Hartman of Coquitlam, who has a long, fairly positive history with Royal Columbian, defended the facility’s use of the restaurant.
“At the end of the day, we’d much rather be treated in a Tim Hortons café than not at all,” said Hartman after he left the iconic Canadian restaurant with a cup of joe.
“They did the best with what they had,” he said.
David Plug of the Fraser Health Authority said the Tim Hortons had never been used for patients previously. But its proximity to the emergency room and the lack of any other readily available space led to the decision to use the restaurant, which was already closed.
“We’re going to review it,” said Plug of the unorthodox approach.
Tim Hortons was officially used as hospital space from about 9 p.m. Monday to 1 a.m. Tuesday, according to Plug. Four patients stayed there for about 90 minutes and the space was cleaned before and after they were there.
During their time in the restaurant, the patents were separated by screens.
Health Minister Colin Hansen defended the hospital Tuesday.
“I think every emergency room in the province faces days when an unusual number of people will come through the doors,” said Hansen. “The hospital staff, I think they did a good job of responding to it [Monday].
“This is space that is immediately adjacent to space that is regularly used for patient care,” he said. “It was considered to be an appropriate use of that space at that time of night.”
But Opposition health critic Adrian Dix, who is also vying for the NDP leadership, attacked the government for not remedying the chronic overcrowding at Royal Columbian.
“There’s been proposals to expand the hospital for more than a decade and all this government has done is close the neighbouring hospital,” said Dix, referring to the demise of St. Mary’s Hospital in 2004.
B.C. Nurses Union president Debra McPherson was also critical of coffee shop care.
“Years ago nurses joined the community in New West to fight the closing of St. Mary’s Hospital, predicting that there would not be enough acute care beds to meet the community’s needs if the closing went through,” she said. “They predicted exactly what is occurring today.”
But Hansen pointed out that an expansion in emergency room capacity is currently underway at Surrey Memorial that will increase its capacity five-fold — in 2013.
Overcrowded emergency rooms have become a hot-button political issue across the country in recent years.
In October, an ER doctor at the University of Alberta hospital sent a letter to that province's health minister detailing a laundry list of cases at his hospital caused by overcrowding, including a patient with a broken back who spent six hours strapped to a spine board in the waiting room and another who had been diagnosed with an aneurysm who waited more than five hours before being treated.
Brian Sinclair, a homeless double amputee, died in a Winnipeg ER in September 2008 after waiting 34 hours in his wheelchair. A coroner's report called his death completely preventable, and sparked an inquest into how he could have gone unnoticed.
Wait times at a Montreal hospital have also been blamed for the deaths of two people in 2010.
At Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital, 86-year-old Mariette Fournier waited four days on a stretcher for a hospital bed, during which she contracted pneumonia, and died a day after getting a bed. And a coroner's report released in January said an overcrowded ER — operating at 180 per cent capacity — figured heavily in the death of Mieczyslaw Figiel, 75, who despite being left by paramedics right next to the triage nursing station was only attended to after he stopped breathing, dying shortly thereafter.
And two years ago, doctors at Nova Scotia's largest hospital declared a "Code Orange" — a status typically reserved for disasters, such as 1998's Swissair plane crash — to cope with a shortage of beds that forced ambulances to wait in the parking lot for hours.
