Overcrowding at Brampton Civic Hospital has been putting patients’ well-being into jeopardy.
Documents obtained by NDP reveal that without an immediate $11 million funding from Queen’s Park, patients will continue to be stuck in hallways of Brampton Civic Hospital as they wait for a bed to become available.
Ontario NDP’s leader, Andrea Howrath said, “Brampton’s a growing community and so unless we start putting the resources now things are going to get much worse,People don’t deserve this. They need the government to start acting on the woefully inadequate resources that the hospital is receiving.”
The information is obtained by the NDP — through Freedom of Information (FOI).
The uncovered information includes an email from Joanne Flewwelling, interim president and CEO of William Osler Health System (Osler) to Scott McLeod, CEO of Central West LHIN in July in which she underscores the issue of unusually high volumes at in ER of BCH, the wide gap in funding needed for additional hospital beds.
Flewwelling notes BCH will need $8 million in funding from Queen’s Park to meet the demands placed on the hospital’s ER and an additional $3 million to open two operating rooms.
Brampton, which has a population of some roughly 600,000 residents has one hospital with 608 beds.
In her message, Flewwelling, admits Osler’s initial plan that Peel Memorial Centre for Integrated Health and Wellness (Peel Memorial) would help ease some of the burden from BCH has not happened. In fact, the Urgent Care Centre (UCC) at Peel Memorial has been be running over capacity and needs $14 million to cope with the demand.
33 admitted patients waited for a bed daily in 2016/2017. This was an 88 % increase from 2013/14.Between April 2016 and April 2017, there were 4,352 hallway patients. Length of stay of the hallway patients ranged from 40 to 70 hours.
Chris Bejnar, co-chair, Citizens for a Better Brampton (CFBB) said, “It’s unacceptable we have a bed shortage crisis here in Brampton and that our urgent needs have been ignored by this provincial government.”
