ER rush has doc flushed

Don Plant 2009-04-22 Kelowna Daily Courier:

Hospital officials called a rare code purple on Tuesday as 23 admitted patients crammed into the emergency room. Gridlock in the undersized ER at Kelowna General has confounded doctors for years. Monday and Tuesday were especially crowded, forcing doctors to cancel surgeries and some patients to wait eight hours for treatment. “For them to call a code purple is pretty bad,” Dr. Jeff Eppler said. “Really sick, elderly people seem to descend on us all of a sudden. They all needed admission.” Administrators call a code purple or overcapacity alert so doctors and nurses discharge patients and make room for new admissions. Doctors treated 160 patients in emergency on Monday. At one point, ambulance attendants waited to off-load 11 patients in stretchers so a medical professional could see them, Eppler said.

Surgeons cancelled three operations, two because there weren‘t enough recovery beds and another because the surgeon had to conduct an emergency operation. “Right now, the pressure may be up a bit because we‘re not able to admit (patients) to seven beds in residential care in the community because there‘s either a flu outbreak or a gastrointestinal outbreak,” said Mary Jane Cullen, Interior Health manager for the Central Okanagan. But cancelled surgeries are a continuing problem at KGH because of the bed shortage, said neurosurgeon Dr. Gary Goplen. Too few post-operative beds are available, and yet there‘s no plan to open new beds for admitted patients in the patient-care tower now under construction. “Unless it has more beds, that tower won‘t resolve our biggest need, more in-patient beds,” Goplen said Tuesday. “Otherwise, we‘ll deal with code purples indefinitely.”

The new streaming program, which requires emergency patients to sit in a dozen chairs, helps speed up their treatment. However, patients in hallway stretchers are a daily feature in the emergency department because there‘s nowhere to put them in the rest of the hospital. “It‘s unacceptable for patients to be cared for in a hallway,” Goplen said. “It‘s almost considered normal, except it‘s highly unacceptable.” The tower is set to open in 2012. Two floors are for in-patient beds, but there‘s no provision to pay for them. “We‘re working on getting funding,” said Joanne Konnert, COO for the Okanagan Health Service Area. “In the meantime, we‘re looking forward to new residential care beds coming on stream this fall, which will help free hospital beds.”