Dartmouth General fills beyond capacity again

Overcrowding has become a chronic problem at the Dartmouth General Hospital, and Monday it reached a boiling point.

Ambulances were diverted to the emergency room at the Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences Centre in Halifax Monday morning, and a number of patients were moved there when every bed at the Dartmouth General was full.

"Today, when we started the morning we had 21 patients who were admitted without bed assignments, and that brings our bed census to about 120 per cent of our acute care capability," Todd Howlett, chief of medical staff at Dartmouth General, said Monday.

There are only 100 patient beds in the Dartmouth General. Monday there were 18 more patients on stretchers in the emergency department, and three others were upstairs in overflow areas.

The hospital convened its emergency operations centre to figure out what to do.

"We moved four or five patients over to the QE2, we explored moving appropriate patients to Hants [Community Hospital] in Windsor. We've also explored whether we can speed up some patients who have been identified to go to nursing homes," Howlett said.

Monday's situation was extreme, he said, but the hospital has been dealing with overcrowding for the last six months. He said it's burning out staff and taking a toll on patient care, and he sees only one solution to the problem.

'In the short term, we probably need another 10 or 15 beds at the Dartmouth General," Howlett said.

A hospital expansion is proposed as part of a master plan for the district, he said, but for now admitted patients will probably have to endure long waits for bed assignments

"Unfortunately, at the Dartmouth General you'd wait on average twice as long to get to a bed than you would at QE2. You may wait two days, and recently we've had people wait three or four days in the emergency department until they went upstairs to an in-patient bed," Howlett said.