Emergency rooms forced to close over long weekend

Sorry, we're closed.

Not the words you want to hear from your local hospital in an emergency and yet that was exactly the case in places like Listowel, Clinton, and Perth over the weekend where emergency rooms were forced to close due to a lack of staff and resources.

“Those hospitals are a local, important service and having an emergency department when you need it is vital, especially when you consider the extra distance people in those communities have to go if their emergency department is closed,” said Dr. Atul Kapur, Co-Chair, Public Affairs Committee, Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians.

And while the closure of an emergency department may seem drastic and sudden, Dr. Kapur said the root cause is chronic and one experts have been sounding alarms about for years.

“We've been talking about stresses and shortages of staff and the need to bolster our staff in the emergency department and hospitals overall for many years now,” he said. “What we're seeing over this weekend and this summer, because it's not going to be just this weekend, is the cracks in the foundation that we've been warning about for years have been stressed and things are starting to break down.”

Dr. Kapur, meantime, also suggested there's no quick fix to a problem so long in the making. In fact he also said emergency rooms would have been forced to close sooner were it not for staff stretching themselves as thin as they have.

“For so long the people who were there were overstretching themselves to cover the gaps,” he said. “It's like you're walking on a glacier and there's these big cracks, the people were spanning themselves and stretching themselves to cover the gaps in care and that unfortunately allowed leadership to avoid solving the problem.”

Dr. Kapur also said it's clear the pandemic has helped grow the gaps past their breaking point, but asked if vaccination requirements have added any extra pressure, he said he doesn't believe so.

“Vaccine mandates, I think, really helped us.” Dr. Kapur said. “The number of people who did not stay at hospitals because of a vaccine mandate is very small in any hospital in Ontario compared to the number of people who are now sick because we've taken off a lot of the protective measures.”

That said, he maintained staffing does continue to be the main issue and one government has known about for years but let fester.

“Many of the choices and decisions that we've encouraged leadership to make still aren't being made, and it worries me that this is going to become normal over the summer.”