Ontario's hospital hallways of shame

Halls of shame

Excerpts:

Down a hospital hallway, a row of stretchers line the wall near the nurse's station. On one of them is an elderly woman who's in pain.

She has been waiting for four hours to get into a room with a bed, but there isn't one available.
This is happening nearly every day in hospitals across the province and the GTA," said a nurse with 22 years of on-the-job experience.

"This is an older person who's really wanting to have some privacy and have a room where they can just relax in and they are being forced into a situation which increases their pain," she said. "Some of them have been examined in the hallway and that's embarrassing, some have had to be toileted. In emerg, you have cubicles, you have people behind curtains, it's not the same." 

As an unintended consequence of Ontario's push to shorten emergency room wait times, patients are being shunted into hospital wards and hallways that are increasingly overcrowded and understaffed, nurses groups charge.

In some hospitals, patients who require emergency treatment are being relocated to "express beds" -- previously closed, temporary beds that lack emergency room equipment, expertise or staffing -- in order to clean up emergency room wait time statistics.

And with Ontario facing a potential swine flu pandemic, Ontario's hospitals are not prepared for the potential crush of patients that could come, nurses say.

*Click here to read thje full article: http://www.torontosun.com/news/canada/2009/05/03/9330606-sun.html