Ambulance delay at hospitals ‘insane’

Senior waited 11 hours with paramedics on offload delay, says daughter

Even the emergency department physician who first assessed her mother was “shocked” that the 90year-old was left in the care of paramedics in the St. Catharines hospital ambulance bay for more than 11 hours, says Nancy Diamond.

The St. Catharines resident said her mother, who has mild dementia, was injured after falling at a long-term-care home at about 10 p.m. on May 8, leaving her with an “age-related fracture” on her hip, and a cut on her leg that required two stitches.

She said her mother didn’t see a doctor until 9:18 a.m. the next day, left with two paramedics who had to wait on off-load delay until the care of their patient could be transferred to hospital staff.

“She was not seen or assessed in those 11 hours. She was there for at least 11 hours. She then saw a doctor who called me and apologized. She said, ‘She has been here for so long,’ ” Diamond said. “Those were her words. They were shocked that she had been there that long.”

Diamond said family members or essential caregivers are not permitted in the ambulance bay. And although her mother slept for most of the night, she wonders what it might have been like if her mother had been suffering.

“What if she’d been scared and I was not allowed to be near her? That’s the part that is just frightening.”

Niagara Emergency Medical

Services paramedics have been overwhelmed with offload delays in recent weeks as a result of extremely busy emergency departments.

Niagara Health attributed the pressures on emergency departments to factors such as a shortage of family doctors, a shortage of long-term-care beds and hospital staff shortages due to the pandemic, making local emergency departments among the busiest in the province.

The hospital system has been using social media to urge residents to avoid a visit to the emergency department, if possible.

“Our virtual urgent care service provides same-day treatment through secure video for non-emergency injuries or illnesses like nausea, infections and minor COVID-19 symptoms,” Niagara Health wrote on Twitter on Tuesday.

It followed a social media post a few days earlier warning “emergency departments are under extreme pressure,” and asking for “understanding and patience.”

Diamond said she also found the experiencing troubling from a taxpayer’s perspective, considering the cost of paying paramedics to wait for hours to drop off patients.

“This is insane. I was so mad,” Diamond added.

Diamond suggested establishing full-service urgent care clinics specifically for seniors, and putting together a team of front-line health-care workers to develop tangible solutions to the problem.

The offload delay issue hit home for Niagara Centre Liberal party candidate Terry Flynn, a paramedic and superintendent of operations for Niagara EMS.

“As a 40-year veteran at Niagara EMS, I can attest to the fact that health care is getting worse and worse in Niagara and the government is entirely to blame,” he said in an email.

“How did they expect to improve our health-care systems while they were slashing budgets, freezing wages and not working with health-care professionals to find solutions to problems?”

Uncertainty about the future of the emergency department at Welland hospital adds to Flynn’s concerns.

“Niagara is growing, and not only do we cover a large geographical area, but our population is booming. Now is not the time to be shutting the door on local access to emergency care, and it’s critical that all our communities have proper access to health care,” he said.

He said a Liberal government will hire 100,000 new nurses, doctors and other health-care professionals, increase bed capacity by 20 per cent, raise the pay for health-care workers and work with them to prevent burnout.

“I’ve been in the health-care profession for a long time and I’m glad to see a political party finally start talking about modernizing health care in this province,” Flynn said. “In Niagara Centre, we’ve had over 40 years of virtually no funding for health care, education or senior care. It’s time for change.”

Wayne Gates, the incumbent New Democratic Party candidate in Niagara Falls, said he raised issues regarding overcrowded emergency departments and offload delays as recently as February, but the problems have yet to be resolved.

“They don’t care if you wait eight hours in an ambulance to get care,” Gates said.

“This is wrong for the people who are coming to the hospital in an ambulance, and also wrong for the nurses and our community and their families. It really is a challenge for us right now,” he said.

“We need to listen to our front-line workers, we need to hire more health-care workers and nurses and support them to get rid of the backlog so people can access health care. It all starts with hiring more nurses.”

NDP Leader Andrea Horwath addressed the health-care crisis in Niagara on the weekend, promising to hire 850 more nurses for the region’s hospitals, clinics and long-term-care facilities if elected.

Currently, Gates said nurses are “leaving in droves.”

“They’re tired, they’re exhausted, they feel they’re not respected. We have to hire more nurses. We have to get rid of Bill 124 (limiting nurses’ incomes), and then we have to make sure the whole system flows.”

Sal Sorrento, a Progressive Conservative candidate for the St. Catharines riding, blamed the ongoing problems on “years of frozen budgets and neglect by the Del Duca-Wynne Liberals.”

“Ontario’s health-care system was stretched to a breaking point,” he said in an email.

He said the Conservatives “have invested billions to ramp up hospital beds and support and recruit more front-line health-care workers,” in addition to incentives and wage increases for personal support workers.

Sorrento said the Conservatives are “continuing to support the development of a new stateof-the-art hospital for patients and families in the Niagara region as part of its comprehensive plan to end hallway health care.”

Plans of other political parties to address health-care issues are available on their election platforms.