Patients wait in ER hallway while ER beds are empty due to staff shortage

Patients wait in ER hallway while ER beds are empty due to staff shortage

David Shore, a patient who made a shocking discovery about the ER beds being empty while he and other patients waited in a crowded ER hallway. (Photo provided)

By Michelle Chermaine
LJI Reporter
The Philippine Reporter

55-year-old Toronto resident David Shore reported his nerve-wracking experience waiting for 17 hours on a gurney in the crowded hallway of the emergency department at St. Michael’s Hospital in June this year.

Shore has ileus, a medical condition that causes his intestines to not function properly. He said that he usually gets flareups which often last between 12 to 72 hours. However, this one lasted four days so he wasn’t able to eat or drink much and got dehydrated. He consulted his gastroenterologist who advised him to go to the hospital.

At this point, Shore called an ambulance because he was too weak to get off his couch. He asked the paramedics to take him to Mount Sinai Hospital where his surgeon was and where he’s been treated for Crohn’s disease. However, he was told it was not their choice, so he was taken to St. Michael’s Hospital instead. “I’ve never been told by an ambulance that you can’t go there before. So I didn’t know that would be a problem,” he said.

Once there, Shore thought he would just be in for the night and out the next day since he had a similar flareup in the past. Instead, he was stuck waiting on a gurney in a packed hallway. He finally saw a doctor after six hours only because he walked up to the desk and asked to be hydrated. “I got up and was like what’s going on? No one’s seen me. I see other patients who don’t look like in rough shape. There were some people who were in rough shape. I understand why they’re getting to see doctors before me. I said, look, I think I’ve been forgotten,” he said.

A doctor put Shore on an IV after which he started to feel better and hospital staff told him that they wanted to run some tests, so he continued to wait in the hallway. “I witnessed horrible things in the hallway. You know, a young woman came in who had OD’d (overdosed) and was unconscious. She either OD’d or tried to kill herself. There were all these cops there and her family. And there was a guy two gurneys in front of me and he was there longer than me and at one point a doctor came up to him. It’s like, ‘Look, I know your doctor told you to come in here because you went for some tests. We got your results back and look, it’s very likely that you have cancer. It’s almost impossible you don’t have it’. And I was just like, holy shit. I mean, it’s bad news to begin with and then to hear that while you’re in the hallway,” Shore reported.

After spending 17 hours in the hallway, the following morning around 8 a.m., he was informed that he was being moved to a room in the emergency department which led to an alarming discovery. “So they’re wheeling me into this section of the emergency that’s completely dark and I’m like, ‘what’s going on? Why wasn’t I moved here last night?’ I said to the nurse. And she said, ‘we’re understaffed. This section was closed at night’”.

Shore was shocked to learn that the emergency beds were empty the whole time he and the other patients were made to wait in the hallway because of the staffing shortage. He spent another seven hours in that room making it a total of 24 hours spent in the emergency department before he was eventually moved to another room in another ward where he stayed for three days to get properly hydrated and treated.

Ironically, when he finally got moved into a room in the ER, he saw an online report about long hospital wait times. “I was reading CBC News online and there was an article that day, that morning, about ER waits are 24 hours, you know, and I’m like, yeah, it’s accurate,” he said. Despite that ordeal, Shore says he sympathizes with healthcare workers. “You know, they’re underpaid. They’re overworked. And that was the case before the pandemic. I don’t blame them for not putting me in a room. It wasn’t like I needed to be isolated. I just needed hydration,” he said.

Shore said he’s no stranger to being in the ER after having a flareup last winter for which he was admitted for just one night and was fine the next day. He also waited in the hallway that time, which was expected, but he was moved into a room that same night and discharged the following day. He has also had four major Crohn’s related surgeries. “I’ve never spent that long in a hallway. And you know, three of my surgeries were in the UK. I’ve never experienced anything like that before,” he explained.

He emailed Premier Doug Ford and Deputy Premier Silvia Jones who is also Ontario’s Health Minister and neither have replied to him at the time of this interview. “I got an automated response from the Premier’s office just saying he received my letter, but I never heard back. I’ve written them many times. You never hear back from him unless it’s a letter explaining how great he’s doing. And Sylvia Jones, they never got back to me. Just an automated letter saying that if I’m not from her constituency, I should contact the Ministry of Health, which I did. I’ve never heard back from anybody.”
Frustrated with the staffing shortage that has further aggravated the state of our healthcare system, Shore is urging the government to listen to the healthcare workers in hospitals. “There’s a staffing shortage and nurses are saying this is what we need to fill these spots. Why don’t you listen to them? Healthcare is not a business. It’s a service. It’s a public service. And it needs to be properly funded. And they have a surplus now. There’s, like, an $8 billion surplus. They can stick it into healthcare. They need to pay the nurses and get them raises. It’s ridiculous. I feel for anyone who’s a nurse, I can’t imagine what they’ve been through during the pandemic. They were stretched. You know, it was a difficult job before the pandemic,” he said.

We called the ER department of St. Michael’s Hospital requesting a phone interview for comments and were directed to call their communications department who advised us to email them to arrange a phone interview. We received an email reply saying that they were not able to arrange an interview but issued the following statement.

Statement from Unity Health Toronto:

Staffing shortages are the number one challenge facing hospitals across the province right now, and this is having an impact at St. Michael’s Hospital as well. We are doing the best we can to safely manage in this very challenging time and we are grateful to all of our physicians and staff for the compassion and quality care they are providing around the clock.

We acknowledge the pressures that our Emergency Department teams are under – they are important safety nets for the communities we serve, and so it has been an all-hands-on-deck effort by all of our clinical and support teams to manage patient flow through our sites and across the system with our partners, to make sure patients get the care they need.

We want the community to know that St. Michael’s is a safe place to come for urgent and emergency care. Like all healthcare providers, we’re working as hard as we can to assure access to high quality care for our patients. Their wellbeing is the most important thing to us.

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