Family waits 12 hours overnight in CHEO emergency department to see a doctor

Wait times in hospital emergency departments in the national capital continue to reach new heights.

At CHEO, parents say they are sleeping in the ER overnight, cradling their young ones as they desperately wait for medical care.

For Vanessa Brydges, it was a 12-hour wait for her son to be seen by a doctor.

"It’s just very difficult when you have to wait 10-12 hours and are sitting there, trying to figure out what’s going on with your child," Brydges says. "Every parent there is just as stressed out as I am."

Brydges says her son was projectile vomiting and had a fever.

The issue is not just affecting CHEO, but hospitals right across the province. Staff are dealing with a healthcare worker shortage and burnout.

On Saturday, 48 children were registered by 9:15 a.m. at CHEO’s emergency department. At 6:30 p.m., CHEO reported 37 patients waiting to see a physician in the emergency department, with the longest wait time at nearly seven hours.

"We keep breaking our own records, which isn’t anything that we want to do," said Tammy DeGiovanni, CHEO’s clinical services senior vice-president and chief nurse executive.

Those who work in healthcare say there’s no end in sight.

"Healthcare has been acting like an elastic band and you can keep stretching it and eventually the elastic band will just break," said Karen McCoy, CHEO’S union bargaining president. "We are headed down that road right now.”

Brydges says they could not wait to see their family doctor. Her son had a fever and flu-like symptoms. She says he was later diagnosed with influenza after they slept overnight in the ER waiting for care.

"It’s very difficult because you put your hope into the system and hoping that it’s going to help parents and support parents and guardians, but your kids look at you helpless and screaming in pain or with confusion," said Brydges.

The long wait times are due to a variety of factors.

"There’s more kids, there’s less services available in the community," Degiovanni said. "We have a shortage of primary care providers and we have less clinics available in the community."

Brydges says the staff were great and doing the best that they could at the children’s hospital, but the situation was stressful.

On Friday, CHEO outlined a number of steps it was taking to deal with patient and staffing challenges, including hiring more than a dozen positions in the emergency department.  The hospital is also working to move some staff with critical care training back to patient-facing positions.