Christian Gammon-Roy
Tribune
The Emergency Department at the West Nipissing General Hospital went through a temporary closure again on Friday, April 17. The closure was announced through the hospital’s social media page, with a post stating that services would be unavailable between 11am to 8pm, but that they would resume immediately after. According to WNGH President and CEO Dawn Morissette, the closure was triggered by a gap in the schedule of rotating ER physicians, which she admits are incredibly difficult to fill and alarmingly common. This was the second closure for the department, with the last being in late October “where we ended up having to close for 90 minutes.”
“We have a person whose job is to fill the schedule, and they are always working beyond crazy hours trying to figure out how to find someone,” explains Morissette of the consistent challenge for the WNGH to keep their emergency department open. “We come within 72 hours of closures multiple, multiple times per month,” she adds, and mentions that some days it’s a much closer call than that.
While dire for local patients needing urgent care, this situation is not uncommon, particularly in the north. “We’re not the only ones in this boat, we have colleagues across the northeast who also struggle and have come close, or close regularly. It is happening more and more across the province, and especially in small hospitals. In large hospitals, there are multiple physicians in multiple types of ED tracks that are working at the same time. So, you have a fast track, you have the folks that are seeing sub-acute, so if you’re short physicians in the large hospitals, it squeezes the load onto fewer physicians, but nonetheless they can stay open. They may close their fast track, and just make everybody wait in the regular ED. Here, and in small hospitals, there is only one track,” Morissette explains.
Despite the closure, Morissette says that the WNGH is doing better than many other small northern hospitals. As she points out, plenty of patients who come to the ED are people who end up there not for urgent care but for primary care issues, which could be treated by a family physician or via community medicine. Luckily for many in the community, those options are available through the Family Health Team and the West Nipissing Community Health Centre, which takes a big load off the WNGH’s ED. However, even those options are limited by their own patient capacity, and the waitlisted patients wind up at the WNGH in the end.
