No breaks from long waits: Quebec’s ERs are increasingly busy this summer

Quebec’s emergency rooms are busy year-round, but this summer, they’re seeing more people compared to the same time last year. Between July 1st and August 5th, ambulatory visits were up 8 per cent and many ERs are overcapacity.

Dr. Christopher Labos says the “difficult” summer is due to a series of factors, including a rise in COVID-19 cases, extreme weather leading to heat strokes, and most importantly, staffing shortages. Which means that an increasing number of Montrealers may leave the hospital without even seeing a doctor at the ER.

“As these numbers get higher and higher and higher, that reflects the fact that the situation is getting worse and worse, and it becomes harder and harder to manage patients, the more patients you have in the emergency room.”

“Here’s the issue. It’s a lot more complex than that because it’s not simply a number of the number of people that are in the emergency room. It’s a question of why are they there and what are they waiting for? When you have a large number of people who are waiting for admission, they might be waiting for a bed on the medical floors, but they’re still physically in the emergency room,” said Labos.

“That’s a problem because it means you have a backlog in the system. That happens because you have a lack of long-term care beds because when you don’t have enough long-term care beds, you can’t move people from the medical wards to long-term care beds or rehab or some other place when they’ve recovered. If you have those patients waiting in medical beds, that means you can’t move new patients up from the emergency room.”

On Tuesday afternoon, Peter didn’t wait for too long to see a nurse at Montreal General Hospital for his finger injury. However, he wasn’t that lucky two weeks ago when he initially had to go to the emergency.

“I went to the emergency at the Glen, I had to wait two days to… I went Monday night and they saw me Wednesday afternoon,” said Peter.

Doreen added, “I usually go to the CUSM, but here today was for a special procedure that they did. But usually I don’t wait. Usually it’s pretty good, faster than today. But I’m not complaining.”

On Monday morning, there were almost 2,000 people waiting to see a doctor in a Quebec ER — with more than 4,800 people in total in emergency departments.

At the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal, part of the MUHC, the stretcher occupancy rate was the highest at 227 per cent capacity, with the Jewish General Hospital at 185 per cent.

“The solutions are both very simple and very complicated. We need to reinvest in the healthcare system. We need more nurses. We need more long-term care beds. We need more of everything, and none of this is difficult. It’s just expensive. We have to be willing to pay for it,” said Labos.