Royal Victoria Hospital restricts ambulance traffic to deal with bed closures

The Royal Victoria Hospital is accepting fewer and fewer patients by ambulance as it deals with bed closures.

• Health Minister Gatan Barrette not budging on MUHC's seasonal bed cuts
• Top MUHC official warns bed cuts, seasonal closures only way to meet budget

Since the hospital openedat the Glen site last spring, it has three timesrevised downwards the numberof patients it can accept by ambulance.

Currently, the Royal Victoria Hospital receives only about 4.4 per cent of ambulance patients from the Montreal andLaval areas.

"They're only receiving the patients that really need to be there," said Dr. Ewa Sidorowicz,director of professionalservices at theMcGill University Health Centre (MUHC).

That means the Royal Victakes either patients who need specialized care or patients who are already followed by a doctor there.

The challenge of bed closures

As a tertiary care hospital within the MUHC, the Royal Vic has managed to whittle down the number of general cases that it accepts.

Most of these patients are being taken to the Montreal General instead, with a smaller share going toVerdun Hospital.

Extra beds were opened at each siteto accommodate the added traffic, said Sidorowicz, who chairs a task force thatmonitorsambulancequotas for Montreal-island hospitals.

At the start of the year, the MUHCwasoperating853 beds. It was seeking$50 million in transitional funding from the province to keep those beds open.

But the Health Ministry granted just $18 million of that request. As a result,the number of beds at theMUHCwas dropped to 832 by the end of January.

At the beginning of Marchthe superhospitalagain had to reduce capacity,permanently closing another 33 beds in general medicine, surgery, pediatrics, mental health and in the women's mission.

A further 20 beds will be temporarily closed for 10 weeks this summer to help the MUHC meet its reducedbudget.

More cuts to ambulance traffic?

In order to accommodate the reduced number of beds, the MUHC hopes to cut ambulancetraffic even more.

"We're still very much in discussion with them to see if we can shed another 1.4 per cent of our quota to the network," said Sidorowicz, who says those discussions are not yet finalized.

A spokesperson for the CIUSSS Centre-Sudthe administrative body responsible for emergency services onthe island confirmed that discussions are ongoing with the Ministry ofHealth and the 17 emergency rooms that serve adult patients in Montreal and Laval.

The goal is to make revisions based on the mission of each institution, their number of surgical and medical beds and the number of stretchers in their emergency rooms.