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New Brunswick’s premier says treating hospital patients in an ambulance bay is not acceptable, but the alternative is no care at all.
A makeshift unit in an ambulance bay of the Dr. Everett Chalmers Regional Hospital in Fredericton has been in use for at least a year, Health Minister John Dornan confirmed on Thursday.
But conditions on the unit came into the public eye on Wednesday, when Katarina Lekborg, a registered nurse who lives and works in Fredericton, posted an open letter to the premier on Facebook.
Lekborg said her 88-year-old grandmother was admitted to the hospital this week with delirium and taken by stretcher into an area called “the MTU,” which stands for medical transition unit.
A Medical Transition Unit fashioned out of an ambulance bay at the Dr. Everett Chalmers Hospital in Fredericton is representative of the strained healthcare system according to the premier and health minister.
“This is not a unit,” Lekborg wrote. “It is legitimately the garage with curtains.”
“There is no bathroom. No running water. No sink to wash hands. She eats inches from the commode she must use to relieve herself. There is no privacy, a tattered curtain with holes. No doors. The lights are relentless, on all day and all night. There are no windows, no way to tell the time of day.”
Lekborg did not respond to requests for an interview with CBC News.
David Coon, the Fredericton-Lincoln MLA and Green Party leader, saw the conditions first-hand while visiting a patient in the unit.
“This is appalling, an appalling situation,” Coon said in an interview.
“And of course the hallway right outside is jammed with paramedics sitting with their patients, waiting for them to be taken off their hands … it’s like M.A.S.H.”
Speaking with reporters on Thursday, Premier Susan Holt also said it’s “not acceptable care,” adding she had been in contact with Lekborg after reading the letter.
“It’s pretty hard to say that it’s better than nothing, because it is terrible,” Holt said.
But if the unit hadn’t been used by Horizon, “then people would be outside in the parking lot.”
Horizon Health Network president and CEO Margaret Melanson confirmed the medical transition unit doesn’t have running water or washrooms and holds up to 13 patients.
“The existence of this unit reflects the severe strain our health care system is experiencing,” Melanson said in an email.
She said the health authority faces “difficult choices” about where to care for people because of the number of patients in hospital beds while they wait for long-term care placements.
Melanson said those patients were occupying 35 per cent of the Fredericton hospital’s bed space on Thursday.
“If we could safely discharge and place these 121 patients into the appropriate setting — such as a long-term care facility — today, we wouldn’t need to harness these overflow spaces,” she said.
“We also have patients on stretchers in hallways, storage areas, and dining spaces. These conditions are not acceptable as a long-term reality.”
Lekborg’s letter called for urgent change, describing her grandmother as “confused, frightened, and utterly vulnerable” at the hospital.
“As a registered nurse, I was trained in the fundamentals of safe, ethical and compassionate care. These conditions violate them all,” she said.
“This environment is unsafe, unethical, and unhygienic. It places patients at heightened risk of infection, injury, and cognitive decline. It is disorienting to a healthy person, let alone someone in delirium.”
Health Minister John Dornan also said the situation isn’t acceptable and said his focus is to get more patients out of hospitals and into community care.
Dornan said he’s not aware of any other hospitals in New Brunswick using ambulance bays to house patients.
