Ten months after local doctors went public with a plea to improve Vernon Jubilee Hospital, conditions may have grown worse.Emergency department chief Michael Concannon said that while last year the hospital was often 10 to 15 patients over capacity, last week there were days when there was an overflow of up to 28 patients. “The numbers are definitely up,” Concannon said. “From what I’ve seen occupancy is up over last year which was crowded already.”As a result, the emergency department fills up and patients are placed in hallways.“The lack of beds is definitely more of an issue now compared to a year ago,” Concannon said.The high patient load at the hospital led to two code purple calls last week, but Concannon said there could have been more. He said that the hospital was at code purple all week but there was simply nowhere to move patients.“I’ve been told it was basically a continuous code purple status last week,” he said. “Due to a lack of code purple beds, it wasn’t called.
Code purples are called when the hospital is full and cannot admit any more patients. When a code purple is called staff immediately send home any patient who is able to leave.Hospital administration is blaming the patient surge on the flu season, which hit later than expected. “We’ve seen an increase in an influenza like virus over the last year,” said Interior Health Authority’s communities administrator Peter Du Toit. “We speak in our system of dealing with surges in January, February; this year it came a little bit later than usual.”Despite the increased volume, however, patients should not be concerned about the code purples, Du Toit said. He said he expects the flow of patients to decline briefly by the end of March.“Code purple is really a part of decongesting a hospital,” he said. “We haven’t had a code purple for a while.”
But Concannon disagrees that the flu is to blame for the hospital’s patient numbers. He said that Vernon is home to an aging population, something which the provincial government has not taken into account in designing the hospital’s expansion.“Even that expansion, that’s not the solution,” he said. “If you can’t get the patients out of the emergency because there aren’t enough beds.”Concannon said the renovation in the emergency department that was completed in December has been a significant improvement, adding several extra patient spaces. However, without an adequate number of acute care beds, the impact of the renovation has been limited.“It doesn’t matter if you have 20 operating rooms if you don’t have the beds to put the patients in after,” he said.
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