If you or someone you know is at home sick, you're not alone and tonight our hospitals are jammed with patients.
The Queensway-Carleton Hospital is declaring a “code orange” for only the second time in its history.
At the Queensway-Carleton Hospital right now, 20 patients are waiting for a bed in the Emergency room but the hospital is already filled beyond capacity.
Ann Fuller is head of the communications department at Queensway-Carleton, “In this case, we've used up all the beds in the hospital; they are all full and all the surge beds, that we use when we are over-capacity, they're all full.”
Last Sunday, staff at the hospital's Emergency room saw 272 patients; that's almost an all-time record. It's the second time in its history Queensway-Carleton has declared a "code orange." The first time was last month.
Part of it is the lack of long term care beds and elderly patients with nowhere to go. These are called alternate level of care patients or ALC, who are not well enough to go home but there is not enough room in long term care facilities to accommodate them, so they remain in the hospital. On average, there are 38 ALC patients. Today there are 56. The big part of the problem is the flu. Nearly 600 cases have been confirmed in Ottawa since the start of the season 25 people have died.
“We've already had 90 admissions which is unusually high,” says Fuller, “so it does look like it's a tough flu season.”
The hospital is urging people to save the Emergency Department for emergencies.
Across the river in the Outaouais, there is a similar issue and a similar request.
Hospitals there are implementing extraordinary measures to deal with the overload.
This morning alone, the emergency rooms in Gatineau and Hull were operating at 136% capacity and Papineau was at 175%.
112 cases of the flu have been confirmed just this week in the Outaouais, more than 800 since the start of the season and 9 people have died.
Daniel Tardif is with the Centre intégré de santé et de services sociaux de l'Outaouais, “It’s a very tough influenza season. It’s severe and in some cases, tragic.”
The Ottawa Hospital reports its Emergency Departments are busy, but managing.
And CHEO says it is continuing to see high volumes in Emergency Department.
The message from all these hospitals is to go to a walk-in clinic or your family doctor first unless it truly is an emergency.
