Province offers no plan to deal with increasing crisis at McMaster Children’s Hospital

Hamilton's adult emergency departments are under the same strain that is causing a crisis at McMaster Children's Hospital.

We continue to see high volumes in our emergency department and high numbers of people who are very sick," St. Joseph's Healthcare said in a statement this week. We are operating at over 100 per cent occupancy on our floors and certain areas of the ICU (intensive care unit)."

McMaster is particularly overloaded with up to 135 per cent occupancy over the last two months. The overcrowding is leading to cancelled surgeries, an emphasis on virtual appointments and critically ill kids increasingly transferred out of the children's hospital, including teens going to adult ICUs.

The province doesn't appear to have a plan to provide relief to McMaster despite hospital president Bruce Squires expressing concern about the ability of front-line staff to continue to meet the unprecedented demand ahead of flu season and a forecast COVID wave.

When asked what help is coming, a spokesperson for Health Minister Sylvia Jones provided an outline of the province's $300-million surgical recovery strategy to address pandemic backlogs provincewide, as well as its plan to add 6,000 health-care workers to the system.

The statement Tuesday from Hannah Jensen doesn't mention McMaster or Hamilton and said the government will ramp up surgeries and procedures."

But McMaster is so overwhelmed it's cutting planned surgeries that require a hospital stay to five a week - one-third as many as the usual 15. The reduction starts Nov. 4 and is expected to last at least four weeks.

St. Joseph's had planned to ramp up surgeries in October but had to cancel the additional procedures in the last two weeks.

This is a government that's just turning their back on an unfolding disaster," said Sandy Shaw, MPP for Hamilton West-Ancaster-Dundas.

Shaw, who is NDP, says the Conservative government knows about the crisis at McMaster because she has raised it. Squires also said all hospitals that provide pediatric care have been meeting with the Ministry of Health and the province's super agency, Ontario Health, to come up with solutions.

While capacity pressures are being felt in pediatric ICUs, there are ICU beds available across the province to manage the demand," said Jensen.

However, she acknowledged, More work needs to be done."

Both HHS and St. Joseph's provided The Spectator this week with data showing the increasing strain on adult emergency departments.

At Juravinski Hospital, the number of patients arriving by ambulance was up 14 per cent from April to August compared to the same time pre-pandemic. Hamilton General has seen a 43 per cent increase in the sickest patients coming by ambulance.

The result has been a logjam with waits of up to two and half days - 60.7 hours - in the emergency department at Juravinski Hospital for 90 per cent of patients to get to a bed on a ward in September. The other 10 per cent waited longer. It was 33.3 hours at Hamilton General and 26.3 hours at St. Joseph's.

A first assessment by a doctor took up to 6.1 hours at Juravinski for 90 per cent of patients.

Overcrowded hospitals cause ripples throughout the system with ambulance offload delays up 48 per cent at HHS from April to August compared to the same time last year.

The goal is for paramedics to hand off patients to emergency department staff within 30 minutes. Instead, 90 per cent of ambulance offloads took up to 3.7 hours at Juravinski in September.

There are hours at a time where there is absolutely no ambulance to respond if you call in an emergency," said Shaw. This shows all of the parts of the system are broken."

Joanna Frketich is a health reporter at The Spectator. jfrketich@thespec.com